Mixed Reality (MR)
In mixed reality, digital objects share and respond to a person's physical room in real time. They can rest on real surfaces, disappear behind furniture and remain anchored between sessions.
For a fuller explanation of how MR works and where it is used, see What is mixed reality?
PTR uses MR for realistic practice that keeps the room, furniture and equipment in play while adding holographic people and objects.
PTR builds virtual, augmented and mixed reality for realistic practice. MR uses the same method as its VR work: a safe environment, real pressure, the learner's own choice and a debrief afterwards.
One room, two halves
The room stays, and the digital half has to obey it.
The continuum above is a line on a page. In a room it is one person, seeing the desk and the doorway they already know, plus objects that were not there a moment ago and that behave as though the walls apply to them.
Everything else follows from that: the mapping that measures the room, the occlusion that lets real furniture hide a digital figure, and the reason a group can keep talking to each other while it happens.
Have a case for mixed reality?
The same method, brought into the workplace
VR takes the learner into a virtual setting. MR brings the scenario into the workplace: a holographic patient can appear at a real bedside, and learners can rehearse a procedure with real equipment.
VR remains PTR's larger body of delivery and accounts for most of its detailed case material.
What the room map makes possible
MR builds a working 3D understanding of the room. Digital content can hide behind real furniture, collide with real surfaces or stay fixed to one wall between sessions.
That spatial integration usually separates MR headsets and software from simpler AR overlays, although commercial hardware blurs the line and modern standalone headsets increasingly support both MR and AR.
Practical considerations
Mixed reality headsets cost more and are less common than phone AR or standalone VR. Most must map the room to anchor digital objects, raising privacy and consent questions when scanning someone else's space.
Occlusion, where a real object hides a virtual one, varies by device and lighting. Room maps can drift or need rescanning when furniture moves.
A 2019 CHI paper surveying academics and industry experts found six partially competing notions of MR. Researchers do not agree on a single definition. Scope an MR proposal on its own terms rather than as a swap for an existing VR build.
To compare MR with virtual and augmented reality directly, see VR vs AR vs MR: Understanding the Differences. Talk to us about an MR idea.
Have a case for mixed reality?
XR overview · PTR's virtual reality work · PTR's augmented reality page
Through the headset
Inside the headset a holographic instrument rests on the real table and a virtual hand lines up with the bedrail your staff already know.
Ideas anchored in outdoor places
Outdoors the anchor is a headland, an orchard row or a sculpture, and your guidance sits on the place itself rather than on a screen.
Anchored objects along the coast
Your rehabilitation and training markers sit beside the rockpools, the mangroves and the bush track where the work happens.
Anchored guidance across farms and museums
Your learners see the canopy, the exhibit or the vineyard row with the guidance anchored to it, on the farm or in the gallery.
Sources and further reading
- A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays - Milgram and Kishino, IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 1994
- What is Mixed Reality? - Speicher, Hall and Nebeling, ACM CHI 2019 (Best Paper Honorable Mention)
- Spatial mapping - Microsoft Learn, Mixed Reality documentation
