Making Sense of Reality: A Mapping of Terminology Related to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, XR and the Metaverse

The academic research in information systems and neighbouring disciplines has produced multiple terms and concepts relating to media-generated "realities", often called with the umbrella acronym XR denoting either "extended reality", "x-reality" or "cross reality". As new technological solutions and media emerge along with new modalities and forms of interaction, industry and academia come up with new terms, or adopt existing terms (e.g., the metaverse), to describe these concepts. This has resulted in an increase of often partially overlapping terminology and a lack of shared understanding. The aim of this work is twofold: (1) to discover prominent academic XR concepts; and (2) to understand what the concepts describe and how they relate to and differ from each other. We approached these two goals with a bibliometric review technique followed by a narrative review. We discovered 19 unique terms which carried meaning in four areas: as (1) technologies; (2) end user experiences; (3) descriptors of the reality they create; and (4) descriptors of the interactions they afford. Our work offers an overview of the terms currently in circulation and provides a snapshot of the complex space of overlapping definitions and metalanguage.