Comment by sdiupIGPWEfh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdiupIGPWEfh | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I actively reject this distinction between AR & MR. For as long as I've been aware of the concept, the term "Augmented Reality" covered both use cases, including virtual objects embedded into the real world. The distinction never struck me as interesting or useful; virtual objects embedded into the real world being the most useful way to interact with augmentations to the real world.

Moreover, "Mixed Reality" strikes me as marketing-speak. Compare the search trends for AR [1] vs MR [2]. While both terms have been in use for a long time, AR was always more prevalent, with a notable rise in interest around 2009. My first encounter with the term MR was in marketing materials for Microsoft's HoloLens circa 2015. Now compare the search trends for MR [2] with HoloLens [3]. Searches for MR don't begin to trend upward until after the introduction of HoloLens, where Microsoft's marketing materials tried to make a big deal of said distinction and the rest of the world started to run with it. As a supporting argument for the original broader usage of the term AR, I'll cite discussions of a 2007 anime series, Dennō Coil [4], which explored various examples of fantastical AR usage. Probably just a coincidence, but the search trends for Dennō Coil [4] do precede the search trends for AR [1] rather closely.

Naturally, all the usual caveats about word meanings changing over time apply, but this one is a pet peeve of mine.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=H...

[4] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

I feel the same way. I worked at Microsoft on HoloLens and most the folks I knew there felt like Mixed Reality was modern marketing spin on AR. It makes sense from a marketing perspective since HoloLens was a very different beast than something like Google Glass, but I find the distinction needlessly confusing nowadays. To me, AR is just augmenting reality on a spectrum from 2D fixed overlay to depth-aware and beyond. I find naming arbitrary detents on the spectrum unproductive. The general public has enough confusion around VR vs AR, especially when pass-through enters the picture. To throw MR in the mix furthers the confusion.

I don't begrudge people getting grumpy about terms evolving through gradual misuse over time. It's certainly annoying. What I would say though is that if you have specific subsets of functionality that demarcate clearly through various dimensions - how hard they are to do, the type of technology needed, the typical use cases and real world value they create - then you really need some way to distinguish them if we are going to talk about it.

Alternatively, if you are going to just stick to one hyper general term then you can't really complain that product X is bad at Y because it doesn't do every single thing the general term Y encompasses. Language is fluid for a reason - it adapts to our needs to define and distinguish things. In this case, the Quest Pro does a subset of things quite well, while completely leaving other aspects of AR on the table. Whatever we refer to that subset as, it's not really valid to then say it's generically bad just because we don't have good words to describe what it does do.

Mixed reality as a term dates at least back to 1994 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality%E2%80%93virtuality_con.... Microsoft adopted it because they were doing surface mapping and occlusion culling, something that early AR (circa 2008-2012ish) really couldn't do.

Tangent: Is occlusion culling on HoloLens different from that done in games? Btw .. the site in your profile does not work.

Yes, the term "Mixed Reality" had some academic use going back that far, but I'd interpret that article and its citations quite differently.

These early MR references use the term to mean a spectrum from "Augmented Reality" to "Augmented Virtuality". The AV term never really caught on, and the Wikipedia link for AV [1] actually just redirects to their page for MR [2]. I can't think of many notable examples of AV at the moment, though something like "Mario Kart Live: Home_Circuit" [3], as mentioned on the Wikipedia page for MR [2], might fit the bill, in the sense that reality is being used to augment the game. Uses of haptic feedback in VR might also count as AV.

This usage of MR has nothing to do with how Microsoft began using the term. It's almost as if they embraced an academic term for the sake of marketing, extended the meaning, and successfully extinguished the original academic definition.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_reality#Augmented_virtua...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Kart_Live:_Home_Circuit

Loved your final sentence. Had to read it twice to be certain that your choice of certain words was quite deliberate.

AR will never be able to mix depth to objects with the real world due to the physics of image planes. MR could do that, so it might be one key difference.

Full lightfield AR displays would have no issue with this. Even some hypothetical giga-sandwich of waveguide planes like a Magic Leap 1 on steroids could do an effective approximation of this.

(Assuming by "mix depth to objects with the real world" you mean "having virtual objects alongside real objects with convincing depth alignment")

A gigasandwich will never be released due to yield requirements. I don’t think occlusions can be handled with variable depth in a convincing way.

You're mixing up the term "AR" with specific implementations of it.

People are now using "MR" to mean something distinct from AR but GP and myself are arguing that the term AR was broad enough to encompass passthrough, overlay and any future developments.

If someone built a VR headset that used small projectors rather than flat panel displays, we wouldn't need to invent a new term for it. The AR <> VR spectrum was all we needed and MR is just muddle on top of that.

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