New Technology Glossary

From David's Wiki
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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

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)