Believe or not, the first virtual reality headmounted displays were created in the 1960s.

But despite technological process and hugely influential pop cultural references like Tron and The Matrix. To me, it still all sounds

a little bit sci-fi. But, according to today's guests, our augmented future is just around

the corner. I think it'll be ubiquitous. I think we'll be using it non-destructively in the

majority of cases, i.e. it won't be something that distracts us.

We just put it on in the morning, whatever format they may be, or integrate it.

And it will be everything from concerts to our workplace.

In today's episode, we'll be investigating the acronym-filled world of AR, VR, VR, MR, and of course, XR, whatever that is, to find out why every gamer's favorite tech is breaking into the mainstream, which organizations are already championing augmented experiences, and what spatial internet, whatever that means,

might mean for the way we perceive the world. All that and much more. I'm Michael Bird,

and this is Technology Untangled. Sci-fi aside, the contemporary VR story really kicked off in 2007 with Google Street View.

Since then, there have been some pivotal hardware advances.

The Oculus Rift VR headset was funded on Kickstarter in 2012 and was soon followed by a series

of quirky headsets like the HTC Vive and Valve Index.

AR has absolutely rocketed into the mainstream thanks to games like Pokemon Go, but we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves.

So before I go off on one about the latest Charazade I call, we better get some base definitions out of the way.

Like, what on earth is AR, VR, MR and XR anyway?

So for that, I called on HPE chief technologist Matt Armstrong Barnes.

So the first one is virtual reality. This is where you put a headset on and you are completely

immersed in the reality that you're in. It's completely created by a computer. So you're in an environment,

you can move around in it. And if you think about it's probably best described in terms of gaming,

so that you can move around, you can do all that kind of good stuff. When it comes to augmented reality,

this is how I take what is really happening around me and apply something into that reality.

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