Most humans have at some point or another woken up and wondered if the dream they just dream was real or not. This can be confusing, but now imagine being awake in your living room and watching a jellyfish swim over to you, and then you feel it touch your finger. This sounds like something in a dream but in fact this is the power of mixed reality: a combination of the universe all humans live in and computer animation.

There are three similar utilities that are able to do similar things: virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Virtual reality (VR) is full submersion into a different world. The background, people and objects are all animated, nothing from our world is present in virtual reality. However, augmented reality places another layer “over” the world we all live in. This is best exemplified in Pokémon Go. In this game a Pokémon could show up in front of something, but never directly behind, because augmented reality only operates in one layer. This is the key difference between mixed reality and augmented reality. Mixed reality quite literally adds a whole new dimension to the experience. Mixed reality operates with depth as well as height and width so it is more realistic and harder to make.

This is incredibly difficult to do because in order for this to work the device needs to be able to convert real-world distances, to the digital world, in order to place, size, and scale the digital image in the correct place on the lens. This gives the appearance that it is actual in the world around us and not displayed on a screen. That is the first step to achieving mixed reality platforms. Once technology is capable of this, the inner components must have the computing power to run the programs at a high speed and be small enough that people can effectively use them. Finally, companies need to make the product affordable and then market the merchandise. While the idea of owning this is cool, many people may not see this as practical and will not buy it so the companies need to keep possible consumers interested.

Why spend so much on this, someone might ask? The applications for this technology are near endless. People have talked about using mixed reality for medicine, teaching, building, and many more things. Right now leaps and bounds are being made in this field and it has even been referred to as a “race” between companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, and Magic Leap, who are all pouring millions into this tech.

While huge advancements are being made, the sad news is that this technology will not be accessible to most people for a few more years. Until its release, we must wait in suspense to see if this technology will be a success.