Reuben Steiger: Time is Right for "XR Evangelism" (As Opposed to VR or AR)

Fellow Linden Lab alum Reuben Steiger has a useful starter guide to XR evangelism that he's constantly updating based on reader feedback. The most striking thing is he's calling it "XR" evangelism (i.e. cross reality) versus virtual reality or augmented reality. Specifically:

“ X Reality (XR) consists of technology-mediated experiences that combine digital and biological realities. It encompasses a wide spectrum of hardware and software, including sensory interfaces, applications, and infrastructures, that enable content creation for virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), cinematic reality (CR), and more. With these tools, users generate new forms of reality by bringing digital objects into the physical world and bringing physical world objects into the digital world.”

So the term decidedly gets us beyond the VR evangelism of 2007 (when Reuben and I were promoting Second Life as the metaverse and the next big thing) and VR evangelism in 1997 (when Gartner and other tech analysts were saying virtual reality was about to go mass market).

"I think it's a matter of 'Next' being sooner than in previous eras," Reuben tells me. "That's what's useful about XR as a term:"

"By using a continuum we can avoid confining the space to fully immersive VR. This means there are at 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more Evangelists (at least) and the breadth of applications and art forms are far broader. Assuming all that, we need knowledge, taxonomies and resources (which is what I tried to put together) and would love folks' help with."

Another advantage: Some applications of AR and VR are bound to stick while most others fail, so it's helpful and memorable to put the stuff that succeeds in an "XR" bucket -- since, you know, they made the crossover.

Comments

[Carlos Loff]

Salesmen - Change the name and go sell another hype, this is even so farfetched that the XR will not even make it to most mainstream blogs - Please, can we skip eve the hype, declare XR RIP right away and move on to all present fantastic real projects ??? This will save many coins to everyone - People want better Second Lifes, they are so far from VR, XR and all that crap that not even a slightly different product like Sansar can take off, cheers - PS - Besides the rant I find XR very interesting, Im pretty sure in 30 or 50 years from now it will be soreadout globally

[Xfactor]

I like the term xr the x is the unknown factor and r is reality unknown reality xr it could offer ar vr mr etc experience all the general public will know is that xr will offer them one of them. Xr creates less confussion and looks cool like the xgames or the xfactor mr looks like mister xr tidies all this up and places all reality based experience under the one umbrella term

[sirhc deSantis]

The last tech evangelist I had any time for was Guy Kawasaki (and that was when Jerry Pournelle wrote for Byte - chaos manor anyone) so the term is - lets not go there, Tammy.
Now Augmented Reality - as a glasses wearer for nigh on 5 decades does that make me OT? :)