New Technology Glossary
Web3
- Blockchain - distributed digital ledger
- Cryptocurrency - often referred to as crypto, digital currency
- Nun-fungible Tokens (NFT) - tokens on a ledger which can be used to record ownership of digital items
- Decentralization
- Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)
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
- Panoramic/180/360 Video
- Omnidirectional Stereo (ODS)
- Foveated Rendering
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)