Spatial Computing & XR

A computing paradigm where digital content is placed and interacted with in three-dimensional physical space — merging the digital and physical worlds so that software understands and responds to the geometry, objects, and people in the real environment.

"Spatial computing shifts the UI metaphor from 'window on a screen' to 'object in the room' — our spatial computing app places a 3D anatomy model on the operating table next to the surgeon, who manipulates it with hand gestures rather than a mouse and screen."

A spectrum of experiences where digital objects are anchored to and interact with the real physical world — the user can see both the real environment and digital overlays simultaneously, and digital objects respond to real-world surfaces and physics.

"Our mixed reality maintenance application overlays step-by-step repair instructions directly onto the physical machine component the technician is looking at — digital arrows point to the exact bolt to loosen, anchored in world space so they track correctly as the technician moves around the equipment."

Technology that overlays digital content (images, text, 3D models) onto the real-world view seen through a camera or transparent display — the user sees the real world with digital additions rather than a fully synthetic environment.

"The AR feature in our retail app lets customers point their phone camera at a space in their home and see how a piece of furniture would look there at accurate scale — reducing returns by 31% because customers can visualise the product in context before purchasing."

An immersive technology that replaces the user's entire visual field with a computer-generated environment — experienced through a head-mounted display (HMD) that tracks head movement and renders a stereoscopic 3D world from the user's perspective.

"We built a VR safety training simulation for confined-space entry procedures — trainees experience realistic emergency scenarios in VR before their first real entry. Incident rates among VR-trained workers were 40% lower than those trained with traditional video-based methods."

An umbrella term encompassing all immersive technologies — augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) — used when discussing the full spectrum of real-to-virtual experiences or cross-platform development.

"Our XR strategy document covers all three modalities: AR for field technician support (HoloLens), VR for training simulations (Meta Quest), and MR for collaborative design review (Apple Vision Pro) — unified under a single XR content pipeline that exports to all three platforms."

Apple's operating system for the Apple Vision Pro spatial computing platform — providing APIs for placing apps and content in three-dimensional space, hand and eye tracking interaction, immersive environments, and seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem.

"Porting our iPad app to visionOS required rethinking the interaction model entirely — instead of tap and swipe, users look at a button to focus it and pinch to activate it. The visionOS SwiftUI extensions made the spatial placement of windows straightforward, but depth and scale design took significant iteration."

In visionOS, a full-environment mode that gives an app exclusive access to the user's entire field of view — replacing the passthrough view with a custom environment. Contrasted with Shared Space, where apps coexist as windows alongside the real world.

"Our meditation app uses an immersive space to replace the user's environment with a photorealistic forest scene — we request immersive space access only when the user starts a session, and gracefully return to shared space when interrupted, following Apple's progressive immersion guidelines."

Technology that uses cameras or sensors to detect and track the position, orientation, and pose of a user's hands in real time — enabling gesture-based interaction with digital content without holding a physical controller.

"We designed the XR app for controller-free hand tracking — a pinch gesture selects an object, a spread-finger gesture scales it, and a swipe dismisses a panel. Hand tracking reduced the barrier to adoption because users need no hardware beyond the headset."

Technology that monitors where the user is looking within the XR display — used for focus-based interaction (dwell-to-select), foveated rendering (highest detail only where the eye is focused), and attention analytics.

"Eye tracking in our XR presentation tool lets the speaker see a real-time heatmap of where the audience's gaze is concentrated — revealing which diagram elements are confusing and which are ignored. It also drives foveated rendering, reducing GPU load by 40% by rendering peripheral vision at lower resolution."

The full range of movement trackable in 3D space: three translational axes (forward/back, up/down, left/right) and three rotational axes (pitch, yaw, roll). 6DoF tracking allows users to physically move through a virtual space, unlike 3DoF which tracks only head rotation.

"Our VR training simulation requires 6DoF tracking so trainees can physically crouch, lean around corners, and reach for objects — 3DoF headsets track only head rotation, which would make the confined-space training unrealistic and break the sense of presence."

A feature of VR/MR headsets that uses cameras to show the real physical environment on the displays — enabling the user to see their surroundings without removing the headset, and serving as the foundation for AR and mixed reality experiences on VR hardware.

"Passthrough lets our Apple Vision Pro app blend between the real office environment and the 3D data visualisation — users can maintain awareness of their physical surroundings while interacting with virtual objects anchored to their desk surface."

The subjective feeling of actually being in a virtual environment — the psychological sense of 'being there' rather than viewing it on a screen. High presence requires high visual fidelity, low latency, accurate spatial audio, and interaction models that match physical expectations.

"We measured presence using the IPQ (Igroup Presence Questionnaire) after each iteration of the VR training simulation — reducing motion-to-photon latency from 22ms to 11ms increased the presence score by 1.8 points on the 7-point scale, significantly improving the realism of emergency response scenarios."