What is Mixed Reality?

TLDR

Mixed Reality (MR) blends real and virtual worlds to create immersive experiences. The paper revisits MR’s definition, surveys 68 papers and interviews ten experts, and aims to provide a classification framework for researchers. The authors surveyed literature and experts, then isolated multiple sensory aspects—visual, audio, motion, haptics, taste, and smell—to analyze MR. The study finds no single definition of MR, identifies six competing notions, and proposes a seven‑dimension framework to characterize MR applications.

Abstract

What is Mixed Reality (MR)? To revisit this question given the many recent developments, we conducted interviews with ten AR/VR experts from academia and industry, as well as a literature survey of 68 papers. We find that, while there are prominent examples, there is no universally agreed on, one-size-fits-all definition of MR. Rather, we identified six partially competing notions from the literature and experts' responses. We then started to isolate the different aspects of reality relevant for MR experiences, going beyond the primarily visual notions and extending to audio, motion, haptics, taste, and smell. We distill our findings into a conceptual framework with seven dimensions to characterize MR applications in terms of the number of environments, number of users, level of immersion, level of virtuality, degree of interaction, input, and output. Our goal with this paper is to support classification and discussion of MR applications' design and provide a better means to researchers to contextualize their work within the increasingly fragmented MR landscape.