# 4 With the arrival of XR, what will become of virtual presence?
First, it is important to explain what XR (eXtended Reality) is.
We know about AR (Augmented Reality), it consists of adding synthetic images, superimposed on a screen, to the reality that we see. The most well-known app using AR is Snapchat, but there are many others, including those that use augmented reality glasses (Hololens, Magic Leap) to transform and enhance our view of reality.
We are also familiar with VR (Virtual Reality), which involves isolating yourself from the surrounding reality with a headset and recreating a new, completely virtual and interactive environment.
Often, supporters of AR are opposed to those of VR: this is a mistake. Our vision is that by 2025 AR and VR will have completely merged to become XR.
Imagine wearing glasses that are as little encompassing as sunglasses, just as light, but transparent. These XR glasses are screens that can add any image to reality (AR) and can be darkened at your will to show only synthetic images (VR). All intermediate features between AR and VR are possible. And since your XR glasses are connected to your smartphone like the Apple watch, their computing power is not a subject. Importantly, these glasses will have multiple cameras to film and analyse the surrounding space. It is Spatial Computing, a technology that already allows AR headsets to identify the ground, a chair, a motor or even a living being and which allows VR headsets to be located in 3D in space, to reflect all our real movements in our virtual world. These cameras can be infrared or integrate powerful zooms, giving us an "augmented human" vision and quickly making XR glasses indispensable.
How will these glasses XR impact the virtual presence when they will be around in a future so close?
1. First, thanks to their multiple cameras, we will be able to follow the movements of the eyeglass wearer's body, hands and face and reflect them in real time on their photorealistic avatar. Thus, all the non-verbal communication so difficult to transcribe today will naturally be present.
2. Then, when several people equipped and connected to each other are physically in the same place, they can decide to teleport together in a virtual environment: without an avatar, they will continue to see each other really and fully.
3. These people in real presence will also be able to invite distant people, in the form of avatars or in real images (if these can be captured), as in the movie Kingsman.
4. These meetings can take place in any place, but sometimes also while traveling in time: in virtual environments recreating the reality of today, of the past or even describing a place that does not yet exist, for example to visit a building to be constructed. Or even in real places filmed with 360 ° cameras, either in real time or in deferred time, when 360° surveillance cameras will be the norm (for example to investigate the causes of an accident by reliving virtually the scene).
5. Finally, it is even possible that the XR glasses wearers that we come across will choose to change their appearance. By the time that our eye can no longer distinguish a real person from a visually augmented person, we could live in a world where our clothes, accessories, hair, build or even facial features could be parameters chosen by us and digitally transmitted to those around us.
XR glasses will therefore make it possible for us to be in real presence, while living an experience of virtual presence with our interlocutors. Does this world scare you? It is already on its way.
Our job will be to make the best of it so that social interactions, potentially multiplied but filled with optical illusions, retain all of their emotional authenticity.
See you next week to imagine together the benefits of virtual presence in the context of international meetings.