VR? AR? XR? MR? IR? IRL?

In a space as rapidly changing as immersive experiences, it’s difficult to agree on what we should even call the medium. In the search for a blanket term many have found it difficult to categorize the wide range of experiences under one umbrella. I think of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, X/Cross Reality, Mixed Reality, and Immersive Reality in a similar way to  Electronic Music. The artists all use computers to create an experience for their audience, they all remix eachother, but the audience gets caught up in how to categorize it and you end up with genres like X-Reality and Deep-Chill-Psychedelic-Tropical-Indie-House-Dancetronica.

I like to call all of the experiences/realities immersive content if we’re talking about things we experience digitally that adds more dimension then what we normally see on a flat screen on the internet. It gets complicated, though, when we consider that the internet, cloud software, and flat screens can work together to create immersive content and experiences, and with Augmented Reality, digital productions can be superimposed over real-life spaces.

It’s almost as if we’re beginning to create experiences so immersive in every way that alternative and natural reality are becoming one in the same. Any reality we experience is made up of things created by someone or something before it. Even though we can look to nature for many answers, even nature is still nature as we know it today. And the dinosaur landscapes we view in virtual reality were a natural reality on Earth at one point, so wouldn’t they all be immersive realities?

As Alex Atala says on Chef’s Table,

“A plant has a circle. A seed becomes a plant that has a flower, transforms into a fruit. The fruit drops. There’s another seed, it grows again, this is another circle… The flower is the moment that we live. The most beautiful moment of the circle. The most beautiful moment. Contemplate this.”

If our lives are all just our own living moments within a circle of everything on Earth, then what is a rock but a projection of dead matter within our own living immersive reality? Is a rock part of a more “real” reality than those we find digitally?

The biggest difference I see is that digital content is man made (or created by AI that was man made at some point) and not something necessarily tangible, but those lines are blurring even further with haptic suits that allow you to feel virtual content. Does that mean a digital rock that is rendered at the highest possible resolution and feels exactly the same when felt through a haptic glove/suit is equal in my reality to a rock found on earth? My answer to that would be, hypothetically, yes (if the rock is programmed in the digital reality to create a reaction to my every sense and react in its environment exactly the same way as the natural rock).

Everything as I know it is perceived through my one lens of perception, so whatever enters that lens is my reality. Someone else’s lens might be able to see the color of sound, if they experience Synesthesia. Another person’s lens might not see at all if they are blind. Whatever reality I experience matters to me more than the journey it took to reach my brain, so whether something is considered XR or MR won’t be keeping me up at night.