Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality
Kathy A. Mills, Len Unsworth, Laura Scholes · 2022
This chapter proposes an original classification system for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality as literacies to systematise the social and technological elements of the medium that conditions the range of social possibilities. Virtual, mixed, and augmented reality technologies offer new affordances for expanding the sensorial and communicative potentials of digital practices and literate bodies that are currently unexplored. Virtual reality (VR) refers to immersive, three-dimensional virtual platforms, which typically use a head-mounted display (HMD) and haptic controls with motion sensors to manipulate objects in a computer-generated multimodal environment. Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital content such as virtual images in the user’s real-world environment. Popular examples of mobile games that utilise AR include Pokémon Go and Minecraft Earth. Mixed reality (MR) is an umbrella term for technologies that fuse the real and the virtual, so that users can be immersed in dimensions of both real and immersive virtual displays, while using wearable gadgets and interacting through haptic controls. This chapter attends to the expanded forms of bodily and sensorial engagement to categorise and understand the currently underexplored and distinctive potentials of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality literacies as social practices.