New Technology Glossary

Web3

• Blockchain - distributed digital ledger
• Cryptocurrency - often referred to as crypto, digital currency typically based on a blockchain
• Nun-fungible Tokens (NFT) - tokens on a ledger (i.e. blockchain) which can be used to record ownership of digital items
• Decentralization
• Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)
• Federated applications - applications with an open protocol for interaction across different host instances
• Fediverse - an alliance of federated applications: Mastodon (Twitter clone), Lemmy (Reddit clone), Matrix (Discord clone)

Virtual and Augmented Reality

• Virtual Reality (VR) - a complete virtual environment. Typically associated with a VR headset.
• Augmented Reality (AR) - overlaying virtual objects and interfaces into the real world. Typically done through a phone camera or upcoming AR glasses.
• Mixed Reality (MR) - A subset of AR typically involving both real and virtual objects or worlds. This term is not well defined and is sometimes used as a synonym for AR.
• eXtended Reality (XR) - catch all for AR, VR, and MR
• Metaverse - A large virtual world or combination of multiple virtual worlds.
• Hologram - A photorealistic virtual avatar or character. Or an image produced by a holographic display.
• Spatial computing - Apple's own word for XR.

Technical terms

• VR Headset or Head-mounted Display (HMD)
• Stereoscopic VR - recording and displaying different views between the left and right eyes.
• Panoramic/180/360 - images or video with a extremely wide field of view, up to the full 360 degrees which captures every direction.
• Omnidirectional Stereo (ODS) - a special type of 360 video which enables stereo viewing in any direction.
• Foveated Rendering - a type of rendering which prioritizes the user's gaze position and deprioritizes the peripheral for higher quality and performance.

List of Metaverse

List of some of the more well-known metaverse

• Horizon Worlds - this is Meta (Facebook) metaverse
• Decentraland
• VR Chat
• Fortnite - a video game by Epic games
• Roblox - another video game
• Nvidia Omniverse - a set of software platforms and tools for developing 3D assets and simulations

Artificial Intelligence

• Computer Vision (CV) - area of research for understanding images and videos
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) - area of research for understanding language
• Robotics - planning and control, typically involving CV and RL, for drones, self-driving, humanoids.
• Big Data - large sets of data, possibly high-dimensional, which are used to train neural network models
• Reinforcement Learning (RL) - learning which actions to perform (policy) to achieve a goal (reward maximization), typically in games
• Generative models - anything that outputs text, images, or sounds. (e.g. LLMs, GANs, Diffusion models)