The search for the perfect term

Science requires the ability to name concepts. It is not uncommon for the search for the right technical term, a suitable metaphor, or a name to take decades. A recent paper by Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Simon Mayer, and Kenan Bektaş from the University of St. Gallen, published in July at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, proposes a new term: Pervasive Mixed Reality. It could serve as an umbrella term for concepts such as Pervasive Augmented Reality, Ubiquitous Mixed Reality, Ubiquitous XR, and Societal XR. However, only time will tell how Pervasive MR will be adopted as a technical term by the scientific community. In the paper, the authors further propose a conceptual foundation for responsible ubiquitous personalization systems—a prerequisite for scaling XR to large areas of public space, as Societal XR suggests.