VR: Powerful. Weird. Nerdy.

There was a time that I would demo live VR in sales and marketing venues by putting on the headset while the audience would watch my experience on a big screen. I prefer not to now. VR in business settings is weird, whether you are donning a headset on stage or taking audience members through a proper VR demo with headsets on their heads.

I still demo VR at the front of the room, but without donning the device -- the trick is in how you hold the headset. It is harder to accurately steer through VR with your hand rather than your head, but you get to stay in the same room with your audience. It's expensive to get a bunch of execs in a room -- why leave the room?

(That said, you still want your audience to put on the VR headset. As Marc Andreessen said in 2015, "Virtual Reality is BY FAR the biggest delta I've ever seen between what it looks like from the outside vs what it feels like on the inside." Only seasoned VR users should get away with just seeing a flat screen version of a VR experience before forming an authoritative opinion about it. But what you do at the front of the room with your VR is my focus here.)

Enter Mixed Reality. Like fully immersive VR, you still have headgear. But they are see-through. You don't leave the room. The VR is projecting on to the physical reality -- a mixing of digital and physical realities.

As for the mixing, it could be salad or soup. When digital realities are just mixed in with physical realities but with no relevant integration with them, that's salad. Just a mix of discrete chunks of digital and physical realities mixed together. But when the AR device takes in to account the geometry of the room, and the software places objects in to the room as if they belong there for real, you have soup. One reality. That just happens to be a mix of the physical and digital.

You could also have chunky soup.

Regardless of the type of mixed reality, it has some benefits over VR at the trade show. E.g., you can maintain eye contact with users. And VR nausea related to the disconnect between the inner ear and the eyes when fully immersed isn't a problem in mixed reality.

But in either case, you are asking someone to put something on their face. To wear something. Not everybody is going to do it. Many people will be interested and favorable to whatever is mirrored on a nearby flat screen -- that will be more visually informative if it is VR, though a video of mixed reality holograms floating in space is plenty cool.

Regardless if it is mixed or fully immersive, VR is data. Just like a movie on TV is digital data -- 0s and 1s -- unless, of course, your equipment and media are very, very old. VR can devote a full field of light towards communicating data, while AR devices driving mixed reality cannot.

For business users, AR mixed reality and virtual reality came to market out-of-order. Mixed reality is the natural first step -- and permanent plateau -- for many business users. Especially when physical reality, either proximate or remote, is involved. But when the data gets really big and nerdy, you need the fully expressive power of completely immersive VR.