If you’ve been following the relatively recent developmental explosion in the realms of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), you’ve probably also come across the term Extended Reality (XR). You’d also know that both AR and MR, along with VR, fall under the same XR umbrella and that XR refers to all real and virtual experiences that have been lovingly crafted using computer generated graphics and displayed either on a mobile device or through a HMD (Head Mounted Display). What you might not know though, is what the differences are between AR and MR, and that’s what this article explores.
To understand this, we first need to look at them individually. Augmented Reality is basically a term used when computer generated content is superimposed on a live video feed of the real world. The main thing to note is that with AR, the augmented content, which often consists of animated 3D objects, cannot recognise or interact with physical objects in the real world. In simple terms this means the augmented content and the real world content can’t react to each other. An example of AR, that most have come across at some point, is one of the plethora of AR face tracking apps out there or the Pokémon Go app. Where AR generally falls short is that the computer generated content is only anchored to the camera view. For example, if another real-world object appears partially in front of a tracked object or image, the rendered augmented graphics would not be obscured by it, creating an undesired disconnect between the two worlds.
So what about MR, I hear you ask. Well, to a certain degree, Mixed Reality eliminates the aforementioned boundaries between real and virtual interaction using something called occlusion. What occlusion means is the computer generated graphics can be obscured by real world objects, such as a piece of real world furniture obscuring an augmented character.
Probably the most talked about MR device around today is the HoloLens but recently we have seen many companies jumping on the virtual bandwagon, with their own take on what MR should offer.
With spatial room mapping, devices such as the HoloLens can provide a detailed representation of real-world surfaces and objects in the environment around them. By superimposing augmented content over this real-world environment, a whole new level of interaction is made possible.
In summary, there’s a good reason we have the separate terms Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality — they are not the same thing. One way you could think of it is that all MR has elements of AR, but AR doesn’t have many elements of MR.
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