What is XR?
by Karen Alexander
“What Is XR?” While it was far from the first time I’ve had that question, it took me aback when coming from a faculty member who had assigned their students time in VR headsets to further course learning goals.
It turns out that confusion over what is meant by terms such as XR and Immersive Media is not solely on the part of those living under rocks. Someone recently posted an infographic on LinkedIn that explained XR vs. VR, AR, and MR, only for a commenter to proclaim, “no, you are wrong,” and cite Milgram’s 1994 Reality-Virtuality Continuum as proof. Jeremy Bailenson and David Markowitz published an article in 2025 that used Natural Language Processing to analyze tens of thousands of articles on VR from 1992-2024. In the process, they found that 80% of Bailenson’s published works did not appear when searching abstracts using the term “virtual reality.” If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to tell you that Bailenson is one of the most prominent and prolific XR researchers in the world.
People don’t really see the full range of Immersive Media or XR as part of a whole. They shouldn’t be blamed; the ways in which we can have immersive experiences of digital content has expanded in such a variety of ways. Often the physical world is intricately implicated in those immersive experiences. Virtual reality is far from the only flavor available in this particular ice cream shop.
For me, the X in XR is a variable that stands for all the other words we put in front of Reality. I take an expansive view, including the full range, from the “shared reality” of Cosm and the Sphere to the “augmented reality” of Pokemon Go to 360-video viewed on a cardboard headset to social virtual worlds on a computer screen to fully immersive 6dof VR as part of a what I refer to as XR. Maybe that term won’t stick. Whatever the public eventually latches onto is what we’ll be calling this medium (or these media), and that remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, wrestling with terminology is not inconsequential. It blunts understanding of the range of digital content available now, today, and stalls the revolution in media that allows us to step inside other worlds, and for our worlds to be enhanced or even transformed by immersive media.
What do you think? Do these terminological questions matter? Why or why not?
Please share your thoughts on the XR Women Slack in the #blogconversations channel.
