Much in and of XR is new. Descriptions and terms are often borrowed from existing but differing technology. We are walking a bridge as we make it.
Seemingly unexceptional terms like ‘document’ are already causing confusion in XR discussions as each perceives differently what it is and how we may interact with or alter it. XR is more than sitting in a virtual office to the work we do in a literal office. Instead it allows things we cannot do in the latter.
These issues of description affect both the content of an XR space and the space itself. We can take bits of information and draw them in a space, but what are those things? Is that thing a document? Part of a document? A proxy for a document?
For first-person perspective exploratory work, these distinctions are less pressing as the impetus is sense-making. But, as we switch to explanatory work, our work will be viewed by others. It needs to make sense to them. We need to be able to describe it to them textually, in a form they can follow even when outside XR.
At wider scope, are we in an environment, a space, a view … something else? Clarity matters when considering moving into/out of XR and when switching between different immersive presentations. To what extent does the viewspec metaphor help understand the common underpinnings of discrete but different looking presentation of information.
This suggests a glossary of terms is needed. Given the early stage of XR—at least in terms of use at scale, terminology will be unfamiliar or even missing. Print-era notions managed to move across in the PC digital age even if close meanings were lost. Whether they should be pushed further, into XR use is for consideration.
On the one hand, (re-used) familiar terms ease the issues of communicating about XR and onboarding. Conversely, terms freighted with print-era meaning that are obsolete or misleading in an XR context may suggest some new terms are needed. At best, some common terms will need new, discrete, XR-context definitions.
Back to XR spaces: differing perspectives.