Glossary | Hesham Khalafallah

360‎-Degree Video: A 360‎-degree video is a recording that captures the scene all around the camera, so viewers can look in any direction by turning their head in a VR headset, moving their phone, or dragging on the screen.
3D Scanning: 3D scanning is the process of recording the shape and dimensions of a real object or place using specialised devices, such as laser scanners, structured-light scanners, and depth sensors, and turning it into 3D digital data that can be displayed, studied, and reused.
Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented reality adds digital elements — such as images, text, and 3D models — to a user’s view of the real world through a phone camera, tablet, or compatible glasses. Users continue to see their actual surroundings while additional information or virtual objects appear within the scene.
Avatar: An avatar is a digital representation of a user inside a virtual world or digital environment. It may be an image or a 2D or 3D character, realistic or imaginary, which the user controls in order to move, communicate, and interact with others and with the content around them.
Digital Environment: A digital environment is a space or system created using computers and digital technologies. It may contain designs, images, videos, or 3D models that people can view, explore, or interact with through electronic devices.
Digital Twin: A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real object, building, city, or process that is linked to data from the real system and updated continuously, so that its condition can be monitored, its behaviour simulated, and what may happen to it predicted.
Education: An organized process that creates the conditions, experiences, content, and activities needed to support learning and human development.
Education & Human Development: A broad process concerned with the intellectual, social, behavioral, ethical, and personal development of the human being.
Extended Reality (XR): Extended reality is an umbrella term for technologies that let users experience digital worlds or add virtual elements to the real world and interact with them. It includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), using headsets, phones, or computers depending on the experience.
Haptic Feedback: Haptic feedback is a technology that gives users a sense of touch — such as vibration, pressure, force, or heat — through controllers, gloves, vests, or phones, making interaction with digital elements feel closer to reality.
Head-Mounted Display (HMD): A head-mounted display, commonly known as a VR headset, is a device worn on the head that shows images in front of the eyes. Its sensors track the user’s head movement so the scene changes according to where they look. It is used for virtual reality and, in some devices, for augmented and mixed reality as well.
Learning: The process through which a person acquires new knowledge, understanding, skills, or behaviors through experience, study, practice, observation, or interaction.
Metaverse: The metaverse refers to shared digital worlds that people can enter over the internet, communicate in, and interact within, often through digital characters known as avatars. These worlds may recreate real places or be entirely imaginary, enabling activities such as work, education, shopping, and entertainment. Some platforms also allow users to own and exchange digital products and assets.
Mixed Reality (MR): Mixed reality combines the real and digital worlds. Users can see their real surroundings together with virtual objects that respond to them and to elements of the physical space, making the digital objects appear to belong in the room.
Photogrammetry: Photogrammetry is a technique for creating 3D models from many overlapping photographs of a real object or place, taken from different angles. Specialised software analyses the images to calculate shapes, dimensions, and positions.
Spatial Computing: Spatial computing is an approach to computing in which devices and applications understand the real space around the user — such as walls, surfaces, the position of objects, and body movement — and use that understanding to display digital content, anchor it in place, and let the user interact with it through gaze, gestures, or voice.
Virtual Reality (VR): Virtual reality is a technology that lets users explore a digital world, whether it recreates a real place or presents an imaginary one. When wearing a VR headset, users are visually separated from their real surroundings and feel as though they are inside the virtual world. Some virtual experiences can also be accessed on a computer screen without a headset.
What is the difference between 3D scanning, photogrammetry, and 360°‎ video?: These methods bring a real place into the digital world in different ways. 3D scanning measures shape and dimensions directly with specialised devices; photogrammetry builds a 3D model from photographs; and 360°‎ video records the scene around the camera so it can be viewed in every direction, without producing a 3D model.
What is the difference between VR, AR, MR, and XR?: Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) let users experience digital worlds and content in different ways. VR places users in a virtual world; AR adds digital elements to the real world; and MR allows digital elements to respond to the physical environment. Extended reality (XR) is the umbrella term covering all three.