Extended Reality

I have been following Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) for a long time as I already described here on my site. And as well enough explained here on wikipedia, Extended Reality abbreviated as XR is "just" the term unifying all these three into one. Therefore, I will summarize my further observations with VR, AR, and MR here under the XR topic.

What started fascinating me especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, where a couple of experiences in working with other students and colleagues together in VR (notable examples here are Bigscreen, Mozilla Hubs, and Immersed). I had a much better teaching, learning, and work experience there, than I was ever able to replicate in Zoom or MS-Teams (or other non-spatial 2D applications).

In addition, I observed that the Covid-19 pandemic slowly legitimized every bad practice in regards of lecturing and random assessment that we as university teachers have been practicing in the last decades.

This realization helped me to unearth the idea to trying to leverage XR (and initially mainly) VR to re-design good education and global access based on the immersive environments already possible with today's technology. If you want to read more about my ideas, regarding education in and with XR, please continue reading on xr4ed.

As I also work a lot with the Internet of Things (IoT) the natural merge of XR and IoT is called Digital Twin.