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Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't able to tell from the video or the article... what does mixed reality mean?

I was assuming it was something like augmented reality lite. This just looks like VR-lite.

Who knows what the marketing blender will do to these terms but this is what they've traditionally been:

VR - Virtual Reality. Your field of view is completely blocked by a display that shows you something completely artificial. Pro: Complete visual virtual immersion. Cons: No idea what's going on outside.

AR - Augmented Reality. You look through glasses that have a transparent display of some kind. Virtual objects are placed into the real environment right in your field of view. Pro: No latency view of the real world. Con: Aligning objects and keeping latency low enough to blend well is hard!

HUD - Heads Up Display. You look through glasses that have a transparent display of some kind. Virtual objects are placed onto the display, but not into the real environment right in your field of view. Pro: Can display various pieces of data where you are looking anyway. Con: Not meant to align or register with anything you are looking at.

MR - Mixed Reality. Your field of view is completely blocked by a display. Cameras capture the real environment and present them on the display where virtual objects are mixed into the capture. Pro: Mixing the environment and keeping things synced is easier than AR. Con: The display will be just a hair behind what you would normally see so it can feel a bit off.

that MR sounds about right, but I didn't see any of that in the video. Could have missed it though... seems like there were lots of sub second cuts in the editing...

MR is just Microsoft branding. The new headsets are VR headsets with integrated tracking cameras so their is no need for Vive-style Lighthouse trackers or Rift-style external cameras.

Because tracking is done via camera (instead of more cumbersome room sensors like Oculus/Vive), those cameras can also be used to display surroundings and augment them, like a lower quality hololense.

So there is support for augmented reality, but it looks like most if the demos currently being made are for VR.

If they can, it's not a feature that has yet been released. There is no data about the outside world coming in to the headset.

People in this set of threads keep jumping to the conclusion that because there are cameras on the headsets you'll be able to integrate real world visuals to create AR-style exeperiences.

It would make a lot of sense, but there is no support in the API for the low cost devices for doing any of these things. The cameras are purely used for tracking purposes at this point and none of the HoloLens-style AR experiences that would seem to make sense are possible with this generation of low cost MR headsets and APIs.

What's kind of frustrating is that MS did show concept videos of what's called "Spatial Capture" on the HoloLens running on the MR Display, so that you would at least have the gross shape of large objects in your VR space. But that hasn't been the case so far, and it's been difficult to suss out documentation that is specific to the VR headset, rather than just old HoloLens docs.

> there is support for augmented reality

Unfortunately this isn't the case. It's just pure VR.

Microsoft branding? This is the same thing Magic Leap has been touting, it's an actual term in the industry.

Magic leap is creating glasses which overlay things onto the real world. These are VR headsets - your view is completely blocked.

It's an actual term to decribe an entire spectrum of augmented to virtual reality. It's an incredibly confusing term to brand a product that very clearly falls on a specific part of that spectrum.

People also fling critique at Magic Leap for the same problem, since it is very clearly an AR device.

It's a cross between AR and VR in which a different virtual world is inserted into the real world [1]. It predates the term, but the HoloChess scene in Star Wars is to me a good example. The contrast is with AR, in which the real world is annotated with virtual info, and VR, in which the real world is hidden. But the terms are a bit blurred.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_reality

This isn't how Microsoft is using the term. For them it's essentially a hollow marketing differentiator and a way to lump Hololens and inside-out tracking under the same banner.

To all intents and purposes just substitute "VR" whenever Microsoft says "Mixed reality".

I really hope their usage doesn't catch on.

Since when does augmented reality only annotate the world? This seems to be a meme spread by Google Glass, which wasn't even augmented reality since it didn't use reality in any way.

Agree - 'annotate' isn't rich enough. My bad.

I wrote an article about how Microsoft thinks about mixed reality in our developer documentation: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/.... The term comes from a paper published in 1994 by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino. Our usage of the term mixed reality derives from the concepts they introduce their, in particular the virtuality continuum.

It is fair to say that the headsets being introduced this holiday target VR experiences. That said, we are building a platform that covers the entire spectrum of devices (from HoloLens to all the new headsets coming this holiday). The platform is consistent between all of the devices. In fact, we made very few additions to the API set from the original APIs introduced with HoloLens to support these new devices. Since the platform supports the broad spectrum of devices, and it's a single API set for all of them, it only makes sense to refer to this category as mixed reality.

It's a platform. Same apps can work in AR headsets (like Hololens) and VR headsets (like the ones made by Acer, Dell, HP)

Your reaction makes me think "mixed" is just the wrong word entirely for this product. To me, mixed has a slightly-negative connotation (mixed reception, mixed feedback).

Technically speaking, the product is called an "occlusive display". It's in the "Microsoft Mixed Reality" product line, which included HoloLens.

It's a shitty bit of marketing legerdemain for sure, but if you dig into the docs you'll see they never literally claim these headsets are MR devices. I guess they are "internally consistent" is what I'm saying.

I have the HP headset, and I like it. I find it more comfortable than the Rift. I find text a lot easier to read in it. I'm not going to be playing hardcore games in VR, because to me that's just not what VR is for, that's what regular PC gaming is for.

The platform provides development tools for AR applications as well. Some demos have shown using the headset cameras to bring in real space elements for AR applications.

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