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Comment by mb7733 | Hacker News Reader

> While AR aims to enable display and interaction with the real world but with augmentations, MR aims to bring virtual objects into the real world and allow you to interact with those.

Would you mind giving user-facing examples to illustrate the difference? As in something you consider AR but not MR and vice-versa.

I've googled a bit but I don't understand the distinction between "enable display and interaction with the real world but with [virtual] augmentations" and "bring virtual objects into the real world and allow you to interact with them". As someone with little AR/VR/MR experience these sound like two ways of phrasing the same thing. Thanks!

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Consider something like Gravity Sketch [0] as MR. You are designing a virtual object and it is useful to bring it into the real world to (a) collaborate on it with others in a shared workspace and (b) envision it within its real context. For example, you can design a chair and actually place it in a living room while you are working on it to see how it looks.

An AR example would be the classic overlay of text on a sign you are looking at with a version that is translated into your language.

[0] https://www.oculus.com/deeplink/?action=view&path=app/158709...

Not working in the field, I’m also having a hard time to grasp the difference. Is one MR because it’s 3D and the other AR because of 2D ? And is the collaboration part a defining feature ?

Where would you set Pokemon Go’s “AR view” [0] kind of implementations for instance ? (First link I found was for a headset, but I’m also actually curious how you qualify the phone only version of it)

Or what would it change if in you Gravity Sketch example each user would be seeing colors or rendering adapted to their vision/preferences making it a separate experience for each of them ?

[0] https://youtu.be/48fVUHnR5I8

I work in the field and I find the AR/MR distinction confusing and pointless.

The first time I saw the term AR, several decades ago, it with the definition that you use for the term MR.

I think for example: AR is a graph/dashboard overlay on real world objects, processing them and commenting on them but not forgetting the result is on a 2d screen. While MR is like a cube that falls on the table you see through the screen and will act if you punch it with you hand (all as seen by the camera) and doesn't care your experience of the MR world is bound to a 2D screen, it is virtually exist in any space around you.

This image show an example of it: https://www.appliedart.com/assets/images/blog/_newsFeatured/...

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