Symmetrical Reality: Toward a Unified Framework for Physical and Virtual Reality
This work addresses the need for a cohesive theoretical framework in mixed reality research, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of disparate frameworks for physical and virtual reality by proposing a new unified concept called symmetrical reality, which interprets traditional forms like virtual and augmented reality as special cases under a single perspective.
In this paper, we review the background of physical reality, virtual reality, and some traditional mixed forms of them. Based on the current knowledge, we propose a new unified concept called symmetrical reality to describe the physical and virtual world in a unified perspective. Under the framework of symmetrical reality, the traditional virtual reality, augmented reality, inverse virtual reality, and inverse augmented reality can be interpreted using a unified presentation. We analyze the characteristics of symmetrical reality from two different observation locations (i.e., from the physical world and from the virtual world), where all other forms of physical and virtual reality can be treated as special cases of symmetrical reality.