Choose Your Reality: Virtual, Augmented or Mixed — from recode.net by Eric Johnson; with thanks to Woontack Woo for his posting on this
Excerpts:
[For VR] The key buzzword here is presence, shorthand for technology and content that can trick the brain into believing it is somewhere it’s not.
The key term for AR is utility…AR takes your view of the real world and adds digital information and/or data on top of it.
The key term for mixed reality, or MR, is flexibility…It tries to combine the best aspects of both VR and AR…In theory, mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as “real,” at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.
So, to borrow an example from Microsoft’s presentation at the gaming trade show E3, you might be looking at an ordinary table, but see an interactive virtual world from the video game Minecraft sitting on top of it. As you walk around, the virtual landscape holds its position, and when you lean in close, it gets closer in the way a real object would.