What Is Extended Reality (XR), and Will it Replace VR?

howtogeek.com:

Extended Reality (XR) is a term that encompasses several technologies but also describes a  spectrum of reality-changing methods including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). XR brings all of these ideas under a single umbrella.

Virtual Reality is probably the component of XR that most people are familiar with. Within the XR spectrum, VR stands alone as the only technology that completely disconnects you from reality. At the very least, VR replaces your vision and hearing of the world around you with a simulates virtual world. More advanced forms of VR also include haptic feedback, which is the term used for the various forms of touch feedback.

VR headsets like the Oculus Quest 2 let you instantly travel to somewhere else entirely, letting you feel “presence” in a virtual world separate from the one you’re actually occupying.

Unlike VR, AR doesn’t cut you off from the real world. Instead, it enhances the real world with digital images and sounds. Pokemon Go is quite possibly the most famous recent example. The app makes one of the famous pocket monsters appear on your phone screen, with the image from your camera overlaid behind it so that it looks like Pikachu is paying your a visit in real life.

Pokemon Go is a particularly advanced implementation of AR. It’s an example of “markerless” AR, where the camera doesn’t have to see any sort of special object in the real world to activate the AR experience and keep track of the correct position and orientation for you. Most earlier AR experiences needed a marker, which could be a poster or a specially marked object.

Thanks to machine learning and machine vision technology, AR software can now recognize objects such as tables and walls, correctly