I came into this space through film.
As my work moved deeper into virtual production and spatial technologies, I started working with real time graphics, camera tracking, augmented reality, virtual environments, and the systems connecting them.
And somewhere along the way, I noticed something.
The terminology can get messy very quickly.
AR. VR. MR. XR. Virtual production. Spatial reality.
Depending on whether you’re talking to someone in film, broadcast, immersive media, or technology, similar technologies can be described in very different ways.
I’ve encountered this in my own work. Two people can look at the same system and describe it differently depending on which part of it they’re working with.
That’s what made me want to unpack these terms. Not to create another rigid set of definitions, but to better understand what we’re actually describing when we use them.
Consider a weather presenter standing in a green screen studio.
On the broadcast, viewers see that presenter surrounded by a three dimensional storm visualization. A tracked camera moves through the studio, a real time graphics engine renders the corresponding perspective, and the physical presenter and digital world are combined into the final image.
Now imagine someone wearing a headset and seeing that same storm visualization appear in the room around them. They can move around it, change their viewpoint, and experience the digital content in relation to their physical surroundings.
There is quite a bit of technology in common between those two examples.
Real time graphics. Tracking. Rendering. Spatial information.
But they aren’t describing the same thing.
In the first, those technologies are being used as part of virtual production to create content for an audience.
In the second, someone is directly experiencing digital content through an XR system.
That difference is a useful place to start.
Rather than getting caught up in the acronyms, I find myself asking three questions:
Who is experiencing the digital content?
How are they experiencing it?
What relationship does that content have with the physical world?
A Spectrum Between Physical and Virtual
The relationship between physical and virtual worlds isn’t a new question.
In 1994, researchers Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino described a reality virtuality continuum extending from the real environment at one end to the virtual environment at the other.
Between them sits what they described as mixed reality, including different ways of combining real and virtual elements.
Today’s terminology doesn’t always map neatly onto that original framework, but the underlying idea is still useful.
Physical and digital environments don’t have to exist as two completely separate worlds.
They can overlap in different ways.
And how they overlap tells us quite a bit about the experience we’re creating.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality, or VR, places the user inside a predominantly computer generated environment.
The physical room still exists, but the digital environment becomes the primary space being experienced.
You might be inside a game, walking through an architectural visualization, training in a simulated factory, or exploring somewhere that doesn’t physically exist.
For me, the important distinction isn’t simply the headset.
It is that the digital environment becomes the primary environment of the experience.
Put simply:
VR takes you into the digital world.
Augmented Reality
With Augmented Reality, or AR, the physical world remains central.
Digital content is added to a view of it.
Point a phone at a room and place a virtual piece of furniture on the floor. Look at a street through a device and display directions over it. The physical environment is still there, but digital information has been added to the experience.
AR techniques appear in broadcast production too.
A presenter might stand inside a physical studio while computer generated graphics appear beside them in the final image.
The audience, however, isn’t necessarily experiencing AR directly. They’re watching the result on a television or another screen.
So AR may describe what is happening within the image, while the larger system around it may be part of a virtual production workflow.
AR brings digital content into a view of the physical world.
Mixed Reality
Mixed Reality, or MR, is commonly used for experiences where physical and digital elements have stronger relationships in space.
Imagine a virtual ball sitting on a real table.
Displaying the ball over an image of the table is one thing. But what if the system understands where the table actually is?
Now the ball can appear to sit on its surface and remain there as you move around it. A physical object passing in front might obscure it. Perhaps you can reach toward it and interact with it.
The physical and digital elements aren’t just visible together anymore.
They have a relationship in space.
Making that possible can involve spatial mapping, depth sensing, positional tracking, computer vision, and real time rendering.
MR allows physical and digital elements to share spatial relationships.
Extended Reality
Then there is Extended Reality, or XR.
I find XR most useful as an umbrella term for AR, MR, VR, and related immersive experiences.
So rather than thinking about it as:
AR | VR | MR | XR
I find this more useful:
XR
↳ AR
↳ MR
↳ VR
But saying something is “XR” still doesn’t tell us exactly what someone is experiencing.
Are they inside a virtual environment?
Are digital objects appearing in their physical surroundings?
Does the system understand the space around them?
The umbrella tells us the general family.
The experience tells us much more.
Where Does Virtual Production Fit?
This is the distinction that became particularly useful for me through my own work.
I don’t think of virtual production as another category sitting beside AR, MR, and VR.
Virtual production describes how we’re creating something.
Consider an LED virtual production stage.
An actor stands in front of an LED display showing a computer generated environment. A physical camera moves through the studio, while a tracking system determines its position and orientation.
That information drives a corresponding virtual camera inside the digital environment.
As the physical camera moves, the rendered perspective changes with it.
When everything is aligned correctly, the physical camera, performer, and digital environment can appear to occupy the same space in the resulting image.
But virtual production doesn’t mean LED walls.
It can happen with green screen too.
A performer can be captured physically, separated from the background through keying, and composited into a computer generated environment. Track the physical camera, and the corresponding virtual camera can move through that environment with it.
Broadcast AR gives us another variation. Virtual objects or graphics can appear alongside a presenter inside the final broadcast.
And in practice, these approaches can be combined.
Physical sets. Green screens. LED displays. Camera tracking. AR. Real time graphics. Virtual environments.
They can all become pieces of the same production.
That distinction has become useful in my own work. I try to separate what the technology is from what we’re actually using it to do.
Camera tracking is a technology.
Real time rendering is a technology.
An LED wall is a display technology.
AR can describe how digital content is integrated with a view of the physical world.
Virtual production can bring these and other tools together to create content.
Think back to the weather presenter.
The person sitting at home watching that forecast isn’t necessarily having an XR experience. They may simply be watching television.
Behind the image, however, a production team may be using tracking, real time graphics, virtual environments, keying, and compositing to create what that viewer sees.
That’s why I find this distinction useful:
XR can help us describe the experience. Virtual production can help us describe how the content is being created.
Different Experiences, Shared Technologies
This is where the boundaries start getting interesting.
A virtual production system may need to know where a camera is in relation to a digital environment.
An MR system may need to know where a person, a physical object, and a digital object are in relation to one another.
The applications are different, but underneath them we start seeing familiar technologies.
Tracking. Computer vision. Real time rendering. 3D environments. Depth information. Spatial mapping. Calibration.
The technologies overlap. Their purpose is what changes.
And that overlap doesn’t stop with XR and virtual production.
Computer vision can reconstruct physical spaces. Robots can map their surroundings. Real time engines can render interactive digital worlds. AI systems can interpret objects and environments.
These are very different applications.
What interests me is that more and more of them depend on computers understanding not just images or data, but space.
What About Spatial Reality?
This is where the conversation becomes broader.
I’m using “spatial reality” here less as a formal technical category and more as a way of thinking about the direction these technologies appear to be moving.
A virtual object can understand the geometry of a room and appear to belong there. A headset can map the environment around a person. A tracked camera can maintain its relationship with a digital world. Computer vision can reconstruct a physical location in three dimensions.
Virtual production can bring physical performers and digital environments together in real time.
None of these are the same thing.
And I don’t think we need to force them under a single technical definition.
What interests me is the direction they point toward.
For most of computing history, we have largely experienced digital information through rectangular screens.
Now, digital systems are becoming increasingly aware of the space around them.
At the same time, digital content is becoming increasingly capable of occupying, responding to, and interacting with that space.
The physical world is becoming increasingly computable, while the digital world is becoming increasingly spatial.
That’s the broader idea I have in mind when I talk about spatial reality.
Putting It All Together
The more I’ve worked across these technologies, the less useful I’ve found it to force every term into the same taxonomy.
They aren’t all describing the same thing.
AR, MR, and VR help describe different relationships between physical and digital experiences.
XR gives us a broader umbrella for talking about those experiences.
Virtual production describes how physical production and digital technologies can come together to create content.
And spatial reality, at least in the way I’m using it here, is a broader way of thinking about where this convergence may be taking us.
What makes all of this confusing is also what makes it interesting.
A production can use AR, camera tracking, real time graphics, physical sets, and virtual environments at the same time. A single device can move between augmented and fully virtual experiences. Two people can work on the same system and use different terminology because they’re describing different parts of it.
Maybe that’s okay.
The terms are useful, but they aren’t the technology itself.
That’s why I keep coming back to those three questions:
Who is experiencing the digital content?
How are they experiencing it?
What relationship does that content have with the physical world?
The terminology will keep evolving as the technology does.
But those questions give me a useful way to navigate it.
And perhaps that’s the bigger idea behind all of this:
The physical world is becoming increasingly computable, while the digital world is becoming increasingly spatial.