What is Mixed Reality?

What is Mixed Reality (MR)? To revisit this question given the many recent developments, we conducted interviews with ten AR/VR experts from academia and industry, as well as a literature survey of 68 papers. We find that, while there are prominent examples, there is no universally agreed on, one-size-fits-all definition of MR. Rather, we identified six partially competing notions from the literature and experts' responses. We then started to isolate the different aspects of reality relevant for MR experiences, going beyond the primarily visual notions and extending to audio, motion, haptics, taste, and smell. We distill our findings into a conceptual framework with seven dimensions to characterize MR applications in terms of the number of environments, number of users, level of immersion, level of virtuality, degree of interaction, input, and output. Our goal with this paper is to support classification and discussion of MR applications' design and provide a better means to researchers to contextualize their work within the increasingly fragmented MR landscape.