Digital Reality - Under the Hood

Welcome to the world of Digital Reality. The purpose of Digital Reality is to bring immersive experiences, such as taking or transporting you to different world or places, make you interact within those immersive, mix digital experiences with reality, and ultimately open new horizons to make you more productive. Applications of Digital Reality are advancing day by day; some of them are in the field of gaming, education, defense, tourism, aerospace, corporate productivity, enterprise applications, and so on.

The spectrum and scenarios of Digital Reality are huge. In order to understand them better, they are broken down into three different categories: 

• Virtual Reality (VR): It is where you are disconnected from the real world and experience the virtual world. Devices available on the market for VR are Oculus Rift, Google VR, and so on. VR is the common abbreviation of Virtual Reality.
• Augmented Reality (AR): It is where digital data is overlaid over the real world. Pokémon GO, one of the very famous games, is an example of this globally. A device available on the market, which falls under this category, is Google Glass. Augmented Reality is abbreviated to AR.
• Mixed Reality (MR): It spreads across the boundary of the real environment and VR. Using MR, you can have a seamless and immersive integration of the virtual and the real world. Mixed Reality is abbreviated to MR.

This book is mainly focused on developing MR applications using Microsoft HoloLens devices.

Although these technologies look similar in the way they are used, and sometimes the difference is confusing to understand, there is a very clear boundary that distinguishes these technologies from each other. As you can see in the following diagram, there is a very clear distinction between AR and VR. However, MR has a spectrum, which overlaps across all three boundaries of real world, AR, and MR.

The following table describes the differences between the three. Later in the chapter, we will go through the details of each one of them.

Let’s explore VR, AR, and MR in more detail.