By now, I’m sure that many of you saw some ad or article about virtual reality, most probably with some people featured with a creepy headgear like this one above.

There are plenty of companies focused on producing their own virtual reality-related gear — some are funnier, some are less.

But it shouldn’t surprise you — whole virtual reality and Metaverse stuff is 🔥THE THING🔥 lately so they want to get some piece of this beautiful, futuristic cake for themselves. But still, even if it’s everywhere, many of you may be confused about how different and, at first glance, randomly it gets called. I’m here for you today!

For now, you can broaden up our “normal” reality in at least two ways, but the situation is pretty dynamic.

I won’t be Britannica here, but it’s really easy,take a look:

Virtual Reality — that’s the name you gonna see most often I guess. And, if I’m not wrong, it was the first one. Basically, it’s exactly what you read — it’s reality, but virtually, in a programmatically created environment. Your senses are transferred through the headgear to a digitally immersed world, which means that you just put some fancy glasses on your head and move completely somewhere else, where you can be a unicorn, popcorn, whatever you want.

Augmented Reality — to say the easiest way possible — Pokemon GO. It’s a combination between “real reality” and “virtual reality”. You can see digital, virtual objects situated in the real world but only with special types of equipment, which mostly are smartphones and tablets, but I keep my fingers crossed for AR glasses that won’t look hilarious.

Extended Reality — as I’ve learned XR stands for Extended Reality but some time ago I met the opinion that the “X” part is just a placeholder and I like this point of view.

It’s the most basic and general name. It’s the newest name you gonna find but it seems to be the most accurate one if you are talking about the general topic. That includes VR and AR in itself, so when you don’t want to specify what exactly do you mean, or you want to say something about this branch of technology, you can proudly say “XR” and people won’t get confused if you are talking about either VR or AR exactly.

Did I forget about something? If yes, please let me know! This world keeps changing and updating pretty fast so I may be lost too.

VR, AR, XR — What the Heck? was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.