What is an Extended reality?
The Future of Human-Computer Interaction
Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term that includes any technology that helps us to merge the physical and digital worlds. It blends the worlds by digitally enhancing the human senses. Though visual sense is primarily discussed currently in the XR space, it includes technology for all five senses.
Extended reality is either used to provide more information about our actual environment to enhance our senses, or else to create completely artificial experiences.
Let us dig deeper to understand how technology is enhancing each one of them,
👁 Vision (Sight)
Vision is one of the more focused areas in extended reality space and also a more active sense in the human system. But it is also a problematic sense to augment.
Few technologies used to enhance vision are,
- Augmented Reality (AR)
AR is the technology that brings anything to you. AR is used to enhance the environment where you are. It is achieved by superimposing a computer-generated image on to user’s view in the real world.
- Virtual Reality (VR)
VR is the technology that takes you anywhere you want. In VR, users are immersed inside experience in the virtual world. It uses computer technology to create a simulated environment.
- Mixed Reality (MR)
MR is a type of augmented reality that combines fantasy with the real world. Whereas in augmented reality, the devices might display the content, in mixed reality, it simulates total fiction. In also helps in interacting with the simulated objects with the environment, for example, a virtual ball bouncing off the real-world wall.
- Augmented Virtuality (AV)
Augmented virtuality (AV) is a subcategory of mixed reality that refers to the merging of real-world objects into the virtual worlds. It is mostly used in virtual spaces where physical objects or people are dynamically integrated into the virtual world and interact with them in real-time.
- Merged Reality
Mixed reality is a kind of augmented reality where objects from both, virtual and real worlds are merged and interact. Imagine, you’re playing a basketball game, you could pick a ball from your room and bring it into the game.
- Holographic projection
Holographic projection is the technology in which the objects exist freely in space and is visible to everyone without the need for any hardware for the viewer.
- Projection mapping
Projection-Mapping is a technique used to turn objects into a display surface for video projection. Again this technology; doesn’t require specialized hardware for the viewers.
👂 Hearing (Audition)
We have been using our auditory sense for understanding our surroundings for centuries, and with the advancement of technology, it is now used to improve audio, selective listening, fitness monitoring, and it is also paired with other senses to enhance them.
- Spatial Sound
Spatial sound is an enhanced immersive audio experience where sounds can flow around you in a three-dimensional virtual space.
🖐️ Touch
Touch is considered to be the first sense that humans developed. Touch influences decision making, and it includes different sensations like Pressure, temperature, light touch, vibration, pain, etc. Haptics is the technology used to enhance the sense of touch.
- Haptics
Haptics is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation to control or receive feedback in human-computer interaction.
👃 Smell & 👅 Taste
Smell and taste are the least explored senses when compared to the other three senses. These are hard to augment as they involve chemical reactions.
The extended reality using all the senses is narrowing down the gap between the real and digital worlds. But we are in the early stages of these technologies. But the future of human-computer interaction is more natural and intuitive.
