Different types of Realities

Physical Reality
This is where our carbon-based life form lives. This is kind of fundamental. Without an existence in Physical Reality, we may not have another existence in the rest of the realities I will describe in this post.

Virtual Reality
This is the 3-dimension world computer generates. You either put on a head-mount gear, wear some sensor-enabled clothing and walk in a VirtuSphere in an immersive VR. Alternately, you can control an avatar in a token-immersive VR. In both cases, the interactions of virtual artifacts are controlled by the computer. Second Life belongs to the latter in this group.

Augmented Reality
From Wikipedia, Augmented reality [snip] deals with the combination of real world and computer generated data. At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and "augmented" by the addition of computer generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion tracking data, fiducial marker recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators. Again, there are two sub groups here. Physical Reality augmented with virtual artifacts, such as Hear&There¹ or Magic Eye². Virtual Reality augmented with virtual artifacts such as Berlin in 3D for Google Earth or Las Vegas 3D Buildings. Historical events link to Google Earth, such as World War Two Google Earth Famous WW2 Battlefields Today, part 1 and 2. Last, but not the least, Google street view where physical space's photos are used to augment virtual space.

Imagined Reality
This is the scenery we found when reading novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, written by Mr. Mark Twain where our brain will fill in the missing parts from the author's description.




¹Hear&There allows people to virtually drop sounds at any location in the real world. Once one of these "SoundSpots" has been created, an individual using the Hear&There system will be able to hear it. We envision these sounds being recordings of personal thoughts or anecdotes, and music or other sounds that are associated with a given area.
²let the user see the real world around him and augment the user's view of the real world by overlaying or composing three-dimensional virtual objects with their real world counterparts. Ideally, it would seem to the user that the virtual and real objects coexisted.

cross posted to Random Walk in Learning