Your constantly-updated definition of Mixed Reality (MR) and collection of videos and articles. Be a conversation starter: Share this page and inspire others!
Mixed reality (MR) refers to the blending of the physical world with the digital world. It allows the superposition and interaction between digital elements and the real-world environment to varying degrees. MR experiences can fall anywhere between the ends of the virtuality continuum.
In MR experiences, the user is not bound to a screen and can interact with both the digital and the physical elements.
In the video below, you can see how digital objects interact with physical objects in an MR experience.
This video shows how MR experiences blend the physical and digital worlds. As you can see, the same experience would be different if the user was in a different place. The MR experience adapts to the user’s physical environment. Therefore, MR technology needs to get data from the physical environment to be able to construct the digital elements accordingly. MR requires advanced input methods and environmental perception.
In MR experiences the user can interact with both digital and physical elements. MR differs from AR—where digital and physical elements don’t interact— and VR—where the physical or real world is completely blocked out.
The main difference between AR and MR is that in AR experiences digital elements are overlaid on the physical world in real time but there is no interaction between them. AR technology allows the superposition of a digital layer on top of the physical world. Instead, in MR experiences digital elements are not only superposed upon the real-world environment but also interact with it.
What is the Difference between VR and MR?
The main difference between VR and MR is that in VR experiences the physical world is completely blocked out. Instead, MR experiences blend the digital and the physical world to any degree. Therefore, VR technology completely ignores the environment which the user is in, whereas MR experiences process the environment which the user is in and include it in the experience. Similarly, in a VR experience, the user only interacts with the virtual environment, whereas in an MR experience, the user interacts with both virtual and physical elements.
Questions About Mixed Reality (MR)? We've Got Answers!
What are some highly cited scientific research about mixed reality?
Highly cited scientific research in mixed reality (MR) often explores its applications, challenges, and theoretical foundations. Notable works include:
Speicher, M., Hall, B. D., & Nebeling, M. (2019). What is mixed reality? Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300767
Rokhsaritalemi, S., Sadeghi-Niaraki, A., & Choi, S.-M. (2020). A review on Mixed reality: Current trends, challenges and prospects. Applied Sciences, 10(2), 636. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10020636
Billinghurst, M., & Kato, H. (1999). Collaborative mixed reality. Mixed Reality, 261–284. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-87512-0_15 r
What are some recommended books that cover mixed reality well?
Some books that offer different perspectives about mixed reality are:
"Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education, Art, and Museums" by Giuliana Guazzaroni and Anitha S. Pillai (Editors): This book delves into how AR and VR technologies transform education, arts, and museums, making these fields more accessible and engaging.
"Virtual Reality (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)" by Samuel Greengard: Provides a comprehensive overview of AR, VR, and MR, exploring current developments, applications across industries, and their potential future impact.
"Research Handbook on the Law of Virtual and Augmented Reality" by Woodrow Barfield and Marc J. Blitz: Addresses the legal challenges and considerations of immersive technologies, including data protection, intellectual property rights, and the real-world implications of virtual actions.
How does Mixed Reality differ from Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)?
Mixed Reality (MR) merges the real world with digital elements, allowing for interaction with both, unlike Augmented Reality (AR), which only overlays digital data onto the real world without interactive capabilities. Virtual Reality (VR) immerses you in a wholly digital environment, cutting off the physical world. MR's interactive blend offers innovative possibilities for design and development, making it distinct from AR's simple overlay and VR's full immersion.
Which industries benefit most from Mixed Reality applications?
Industries that benefit most from Mixed Reality (MR) applications include healthcare, education, manufacturing, and retail. In healthcare, MR aids in complex surgeries by overlaying crucial patient data onto the surgeon's field of view, enhancing precision. Education leverages MR for immersive learning experiences, making complex subjects more accessible and engaging. Manufacturing uses MR for training, maintenance, and assembly, allowing workers to interact with 3D machinery models for better understanding and efficiency. Retail offers customers a unique way to visualize products in their own space before purchasing, improving satisfaction and reducing returns.
Design for Mixed Reality (MR) involves principles that ensure immersive and intuitive experiences. These include:
Spatial awareness: MR applications should understand and respect the user's physical environment and integrate digital content seamlessly into the real world.
User comfort: Designers should have ergonomics in mind. This includes minimizing motion sickness through stable and coherent movement and ensuring that interfaces do not overwhelm or fatigue users.
Interactivity: MR experiences should offer meaningful interaction and allow users to manipulate virtual objects in a natural and responsive way.
Contextual relevance: Digital content should be relevant to the user's physical surroundings and enhance their real-world environment without distraction or out of place.
Visual clarity: Ensure virtual elements are easily distinguishable from the real world, with clear visual cues and interfaces guiding user interaction.
Adaptability: MR designs should adapt to different user environments and preferences, providing personalized experiences that cater to a wide range of users and use cases.
How do UI/UX design approaches differ in MR compared to traditional digital design?
UI/UX design for Mixed Reality (MR) diverges from traditional digital design by focusing on spatial interaction, physical ergonomics, and immersive experiences. In MR, designers must integrate digital elements into the 3D space and make interactions feel natural and intuitive. This involves the consideration of spatial dynamics, user comfort, and visually clear and contextually relevant interfaces that facilitate seamless interaction between the user and the virtual environment.
How can designers ensure usability and accessibility in MR applications?
Designers can ensure usability and accessibility in Mixed Reality (MR) applications with these key strategies:
Inclusive design: Consider the diverse needs and abilities of users. Include options for different interaction modes (e.g., voice commands, gestures) to accommodate various physical abilities.
Ergonomics: Design interactions that minimize physical strain. Remember the comfort of movements and the ergonomic placement of virtual elements to prevent fatigue.
Straightforward navigation: Implement intuitive navigation systems. Use spatial cues and easy-to-understand instructions to guide users through MR environments without confusion.
Adaptive interfaces: Create interfaces that adapt to individual user needs, including adjustable text sizes, contrast settings, and audio descriptions to cater to users with visual or hearing impairments.
Feedback and assistance: Offer immediate and clear feedback on user actions. Provide easily accessible help and support within the MR experience to assist users in learning and troubleshooting.
Test with diverse users: Conduct usability testing with diverse users, including those with disabilities. This helps identify and address accessibility barriers in MR applications.
What role does artificial intelligence (AI) play in MR experiences?
AI enhances Mixed Reality (MR) and makes it more interactive, personalized, and intelligent. It powers contextual interactions and allows MR systems to understand and respond to user commands and gestures. AI personalizes experiences and adapts to individual user preferences. Through computer vision, AI improves the realism of digital content integration, making MR experiences more immersive.
Additionally, AI supports accessibility by offering features like real-time translation and speech recognition, and it enriches MR applications with predictive analytics, anticipating user needs for a seamless experience.
3D modeling skills are helpful in Mixed Reality (MR) design. They are essential to design immersive environments and realistic objects that enhance user interaction and engagement. These skills enable the creation of detailed, high-quality visuals crucial for convincing MR experiences.
They are also very useful for prototyping and to explore different ideas within the MR space.
To conduct user research for Mixed Reality (MR) projects, focus on understanding user needs through interviews and surveys. Prototype testing is crucial; develop MR prototypes and observe how users interact with them to identify usability issues. Include ethnographic research to see how users might use MR in real-world contexts.
Ensure accessibility by involving users with diverse abilities. Utilize iterative feedback loops, incorporating user feedback into design refinements. Advanced methods like physiological measurements can also provide insights into user engagement and immersion.
Improve your UX / UI Design skills and grow your career! Join IxDF now!
Learn More About Mixed Reality (MR)
Make learning as easy as watching Netflix: Learn more about Mixed Reality (MR) by taking the
online IxDF Course UX Design for Virtual Reality.
Why? Because design skills make you valuable. In any job. Any industry.
In This Course, You'll
Get excited to build the skills to move your UX design practice from 2D traditional interfaces into the fully immersive 3D worlds of virtual reality. In VR, your users aren't behind a screen. They're living inside an environment you've designed, looking around, reaching out, sometimes losing their balance because their body believes what their eyes see. In this course, you'll learn to design immersive experiences through spatial design and narrative- and emotion-driven storytelling, with examples from VR leaders like Meta, Apple, Sony, HTC, Valve, and Google. You'll ground that work in user research and usability testing and use VR prototyping to move ideas from concept to testable experience. According to PwC, 23 million jobs will be transformed by VR and AR by 2030, with growing demand across gaming, healthcare, education, training, and remote collaboration. If you're ready to design for one of the most rapidly expanding mediums in tech, this course gives you the skills and methods you need, no prior VR experience required.
Make yourself invaluable when you learn to design for presence through deliberate choices in narrative, spatial audio, emotion, and interaction. You'll work with Don Norman's principles of interaction translated into three dimensions, and use storytelling, improv, and imagineering as design tools. You'll also tackle the constraints unique to VR, such as motion sickness, eye strain, VR onboarding, and the real-world hazards like users who forget where their coffee table is. As AI generates more 3D assets and adaptive VR experiences, your human design judgment about what feels real and what causes discomfort becomes more valuable than ever.
Gain confidence and credibility as you master the evaluation methods built specifically for headset-based experiences. You'll learn to assess VR designs using the Murtza, Monroe, and Youmans heuristics, which are adapted from Nielsen's classic ten with VR-specific criteria like immersion, comfort, and natural interactivity. Using the USE scorecard, you'll be able to measure the usability, satisfaction, and effectiveness of your work. On top of that, you'll learn how to measure presence through questionnaires, physiological signals like heart rate and EEG, and behavioral data on how users perform inside the experience.
Craft a personal portfolio with optional hands-on activities and downloadable templates. You'll work on your own VR game or training program and finish the course with a low-fi VR prototype and case study that proves you can take an immersive VR concept from research to testable experience. Whether you're adding VR to your UX design practice or stepping into immersive design for the first time, you'll finish the course ready to design the kind of experiences in which users feel present, engaged, and in control.
Learn From Industry Leaders
Master complex skills with proven best practices and toolkits directly from industry leaders. Meet your experts for this course:
Frank Spillers: Service Designer and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics.
Mel Slater: Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Department of Clinical Psychology, active member of the Institute of Neurosciences, and Co-Director of Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology).
Earn Industry-Recognized Certificates
Industry giants trust our courses to train their teams, and prestigious universities integrate our content into their curricula. Add your certificates to your LinkedIn profile, résumé, and job applications.
Beyond AR vs. VR: What is the Difference between AR vs. MR vs. VR vs. XR?
There is a fair amount of confusion about the differences between the terms virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and extended reality (XR). While most people have stuck with AR and VR to describe the different technologies, these terms are not enough to fully comprehend
Social shares
1.2k
Published
Read Article
Beyond AR vs. VR: What is the Difference between AR vs. MR vs. VR vs. XR?
There is a fair amount of confusion about the differences between the terms virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and extended reality (XR). While most people have stuck with AR and VR to describe the different technologies, these terms are not enough to fully comprehend the extent of these technologies and harness their potential. That’s why we’re going to explore them in detail now.
According to research by MarketsandMarkets, the market size of all extended reality technologies combined is expected to reach USD 125.2 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.6% between 2021 and 2026. As a UX designer, you have the chance to contribute to this technology revolution and help define how to take user experience to the next level.
The first step is to define each technology clearly. Once you understand the possibilities each one offers, you’ll be able to adapt your UX design knowledge to these new environments.
Let’s start by looking at the word they all have in common: “reality.” What does “reality” mean in the context of AR, MR, VR and XR?
What is Reality?
Have you ever been in an argument with someone over a specific color? Did it seem dark blue to you and black to the other person? To some extent, the way we process information and construct reality is unique to each one of us—our genetics, previous experiences, etc.—and shapes how we perceive the world.
Humans tend to confuse reality with the physical world and struggle to understand why virtual reality feels so real even when they know it is not.
“We have had people literally run out of the VR room, even though they know that what they are witnessing is not real”
— Mel Slater, Distinguished Scientist and VR pioneer, Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona
To understand these technologies, you need to understand reality as a construct that each of us makes based on what we perceive from our senses, whether what we perceive comes from the digital or the physical world. The same thing happens when we watch movies. Do you remember the last time you cried or laughed while watching a movie? Were you aware that what you were watching was not real? Yes. Did it make you cry or laugh anyway? If the movie was good, absolutely! Even though you knew you were watching fiction, it felt real at the time. Extended reality technologies add another layer to this phenomenon, which makes the experiences feel even more intense.
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality. We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”
— Patrick Cavanagh, Research Professor, Dartmouth College
When you wear a VR headset, you can feel present in a fully digital environment. The digital information that you perceive through your senses overpowers your reasoning “this is not real.” For your body, at that moment, it is real.
And for all these technologies to work, they all need to feel real. The difference between them is how much they rely on physical or digital elements.
What is the Virtuality Continuum?
The virtuality continuum—continuum being the critical word—contains the full spectrum of possibilities between the entirely physical world or real environment and the fully digital world or virtual environment. In a continuum, adjacent parts are almost indistinguishable, but the extremes are very different. The researchers Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino first introduced the virtuality continuum or reality-virtuality continuum concept in 1994.
Representation of the virtuality continuum (adapted from Milgram; Kishino, 1994).
The virtuality continuum is a theoretical framework that can help you visualize and understand the differences between the various technologies that exist today and those that are yet to be invented. For example, you can simplify the concept and think of a spectrum of immersion, where one end is low immersion and the other end is high immersion. Then, you can situate the technologies according to the degree of immersion they provide.
Representation of current XR technologies according to the spectrum of immersion.
Sometimes the exact limits of the various technologies are not a hundred percent clear, and they may overlap. However, the critical part is that you understand the region they occupy in the spectrum. This exercise will help you clarify the differences between all these technologies.
What is Extended Reality (XR)?
Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term that encompasses any sort of technology that alters reality by adding digital elements to the physical or real-world environment by any extent, blurring the line between the physical and the digital world.
XR includes AR, MR, VR, and any technology—even those that have yet to be developed—situated at any point of the virtuality continuum.
The term XR includes AR, MR, VR, and any technology that blends the physical and the digital world.
Bear in mind that XR technologies keep evolving, and their full potential remains to be seen. There are still many things to discover about how users can better interact with them and achieve the best results. For a UX designer specializing in XR experiences, the difficulty lies in the lack of defined standards. An excellent place to start is to keep experiences simple and push the envelope a little bit at a time. In the case of new technologies, usability testing will be your best friend.
What is Augmented Reality (AR)?
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that allows the superposition of digital elements into the real-world environment. In the AR experience, you can see a composite view of physical or real-world elements and digital elements. While some AR experiences may offer a certain degree of interaction between physical and virtual elements, typically, there is limited to no direct interaction between the digital and physical world components.
AR experiences are close to the physical world end of the virtuality continuum. The ability to overlay digital objects onto the physical world is revolutionizing many industries such as gaming, education, healthcare, and manufacturing. For example, have you ever been to the doctor for a blood test, and the nurse couldn’t find your vein? It can be excruciating. What if AR technology could help with that?
AccuVein uses projection-based AR technology and a laser-based scanner to convert the heat signature of a patient’s veins into an image superimposed on the skin, making the veins easier for clinicians to locate. This AR technology increases the likelihood of a successful first-time injection by 350%.
As a UX designer specializing in AR experiences, you have the chance to go beyond the rectangular square of a screen and contribute to a revolution that will continue to change the way we interact with digital products. However, you’ll need to be aware of additional parameters to deliver a good UX that you may not be used to, like physical constraints and safety issues.
Advance Your Career With This Free Template
for “AR Usability Plan Example”
What is Mixed Reality (MR)?
Mixed reality (MR) is a technology that allows not only the superposition of digital elements into the real-world environment but also their interaction. In the MR experience, the user can see and interact with both the digital elements and the physical ones. Therefore, MR experiences get input from the environment and will change according to it.
In MR experiences the user can interact with both digital and physical elements. MR differs from AR—where digital and physical elements don’t interact— and VR—where the physical or real world is completely blocked out.
As a UX designer specializing in MR, you’ll have to master all the possibilities that MR technologies have to offer. Immersive experiences add a new layer to the user experience and require you to learn continuously and stay up to date to deliver an excellent user experience.
What is Virtual Reality (VR)?
Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that allows the creation of a fully-immersive digital environment. In VR experiences, the physical or real-world environment is entirely blocked out.
VR experiences are located at the fully virtual extreme of the virtuality continuum.
Many people struggle with the fact that VR experiences generate true emotional responses even if we know it’s “fake.” Keep in mind that humans construct reality from the information they receive from their senses, and this is why, even if we are aware that we have a fully digital experience, our bodies respond in the same way. Typically, VR takes advantage of the visual and auditory systems. However, there is an even greater sense of presence and immersion if you add other senses. Have you heard about the “Walk the Plank” challenge? It is a VR experience where you enter an elevator and get out at the top of a skyscraper. Then you’re asked to “walk a plank.” Just with auditory and visual stimulation, many people (especially those who suffer from a fear of heights) can’t do it, even though they are aware that what they see and hear is not real. However, if you add a physical plank to the setup and thus activate the sense of touch, even fewer people will be able to do it.
In this video, you can see how football players try the “Walk the Plank” VR experience with a physical plank and struggle to complete the experience, even though they are aware that the heights are not “real.”
The more coherent information we get through our senses, the more immersive the experience. As a UX designer, you’ll have to consider the different dimensions of the experience and the particularities of VR technology to create the best possible experience for your user.
Advance Your Career With This Free Template
for “Storyboard for VR”
The Take Away
There are many technologies that alter our perception of reality by adding digital elements to the physical world to a greater or lesser extent. All these technologies can be situated at some point of the virtuality continuum according to the extent that the digital elements block the real-world environment and their interactive capabilities. If you have the image of the virtuality continuum in your head, you’ll be able to clearly see the difference between each type of technology.
The most important terms to learn to harness the potential of these new technologies are:
Augmented reality (AR): a view of the real world—physical world—with an overlay of digital elements.
Mixed Reality (MR): a view of the real world—physical world—with an overlay of digital elements where physical and digital elements can interact.
Virtual reality (VR): a fully-immersive digital environment.
Extended reality (XR): an umbrella term that covers all these different technologies, including AR, MR, and VR.
As all these technologies keep evolving and new ones emerge, UX designers need to keep learning and understanding the characteristics of each one to deliver the best possible user experience. If you can clearly distinguish AR, MR and VR and any other XR technology, you’ll be able to design experiences that take advantage of each technology and give an outstanding boost to your UX career!
