I’ve been struggling with the terms “Augmented Reality” and “Virtual Reality”. To me they don’t really describe where we might want to go, so much as particular technological approaches for getting there.
Imagine if we always named a novel after the method that was used to print it. The technological means of distribution is an essential component of a novel, but a novel is so much more than a particular printing technology.
That’s why I am leaning, in my own description of our long term research goals, toward the phrase “Future Reality”. I like it because it doesn’t actually contain any hints at all about what techniques we might use to get there. And therefore it doesn’t skew us too much toward one technological path or another.
The empirical experiments that I am mostly interested in are not about answering questions like “How do we make a lighter / lower power / higher resolution headset?”, or “What’s the best form of position tracking?” Those are indeed important questions, but to me they are the questions about printing technology, not about literature.
So our experiments center on putting people into experiences together — using technology that is now expensive, but that will at some point in the future become cheap and widely available — and asking questions about social interaction, play, learning, culture. All those messy but wonderful things that any communication technology is really all about, be it a stone tablet or a smart phone.
I don’t think it matters what things are called. “Silver screen” “movies” “paperbacks” “films” “pulp fiction” all in part refer to the technologies behind the products, but we barely pay any mind to that fact. The words mean something else now to us. We still say “films” when no actual film is involved at all. VR sounds fine to me and if it’s a term the masses can use then that’s all that matters. It will evolve anyway. A slang derivative of it may become what we use as our way of referring to it in the future anyway (blog, movie) and I don’t think anyone can decide at this point what term will go viral.
FWIW though I don’t think “augmented reality” has any traction in the marketplace at all and should be discarded.
Jason: Good comment. There’s an interesting difference between what you are discussing and what I am discussing. You are, quite sensibly, talking about what will work in the marketplace (that is: what eventually becomes “current usage”). I am discussing how to frame a research agenda. That is, how to talk about things that are, by their very nature, still in the future.