Terms to work with.
A starting vocabulary for reading course descriptions and discussing immersive projects. Exact usage can vary between tools and communities.
- Extended reality (XR)
- An umbrella term commonly used for VR, AR and MR.
- Immersive media
- Media that gives people a sense of being surrounded by, or present within, an experience. It can involve different combinations of image, sound, space and interaction.
- Spatial computing
- A broad term for computing experiences that use or respond to three-dimensional space, including the relationship between people, digital content and their surroundings.
- Presence
- The subjective feeling of being in a place or experience. Visual realism alone does not guarantee it.
- Tracking
- Estimating the position or movement of a device, person or object so an experience can respond.
- Degrees of freedom (DoF)
- The independent ways an object can move. In XR, 6DoF commonly refers to rotation around three axes and translation along three axes.
- Interaction
- The ways a participant can act on an experience and receive a response, using inputs such as movement, gaze, controllers or hands.
- Location-based XR
- An immersive experience designed for a particular physical setting or venue. The space and how people use it are part of the design.
- Prototype
- A focused, testable version of an idea used to learn about an interaction, workflow or creative direction.
- Real-time rendering
- Producing images quickly enough for the scene to respond interactively to changes and user input.
- Spatial storytelling
- Designing a narrative through the relationship between space, attention, movement and events.
- Micro-credential
- A record of assessed learning outcomes from a smaller learning experience. The Academy’s credential model is in development.
Use vocabulary to ask better questions.
When a term seems ambiguous, ask what it means in the specific course, tool or project. A concrete example is often more useful than a label.