Industry Terms & Definitions 📚

This is a brief (non-comprehensive) list of commonly used terms and acronyms you will hear and see across the web.

VR (Virtual Reality)

Virtual Reality are computer generated environments with an intent to replace the real world environment (that you exist in) with a simulated environment.

AR (Augmented Reality)

Augmented reality, like virtual reality, are also computer generated environments but with an intent to enhance the perception of the real world environment, rather than replacing it.

XR (Cross Reality)

Cross Reality is used as a catch-all phrase (hence the “X”) to encompass immersive technologies that blend the digital and physical worlds, like virtual reality and augmented reality.

360° Video

360° video uses an omnidirectional camera to capture video from all angles; each video frame is then stitched together to create an single immersive 360° video that can be viewed.

HMD (Head Mounted Display)

A head mounted display (HMD) is simply a wearable device placed on your head that has a display for one or both eyes.

Inside Out Positional Tracking

Inside-Out positional tracking places the tracking sensors onto the VR headset itself rather than mounting them separately in a environment, as seen with current headsets like the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift where the sensors are placed at a safe distance from the user.

CV (Computer Vision)

Computer vision is the process of computers mimicking human vision to understand and predict visual input. Computer vision is used in a host of applications such as identifying scanned text in documents, object recognition in autonomous vehicles, and swapping faces with your dog on Snapchat.

HCI (Human Computer Interaction)

Human Computer Interaction is a field of study looking at the interactions between a person, a computer, and the interfaces required to facilitate this relationship such as a GUI (graphical user interface) or VUI (voice user interface).

Lightfield

Lightfield technology is a type of camera capture where the angular information of light is obtained and from this information, we replicate environments in a virtual space by computing the captured light ray angles.

Foveated Rendering

Foveated rendering is a graphics rendering technique that uses an eye tracker combined with a VR headset to show a high-quality image in the center (foveal) area of vision and a low-quality image in the periphery vision, improving the computational cost of rendering graphics.

IPD (Interpupillary Distance)

Interpupillary distance is simply the distance between the pupils of your eyes. This measurement is used by the HMD to optimize the screen in front of the user’s eyes for the best viewing experience.