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What Is Extended Reality (AR/VR)?
Extended reality refers to technology that provides users with an experience that alters, extends, or reconstructs the “reality” they experience.
Often incorporating both sights and sounds, extended reality can transport users to new worlds or modify how they see the “real” world around them.
The notable examples of extended reality are augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). In augmented reality, users make use of glasses, screens, or other devices that provide an overlay of new visual or sonic elements over the reality.
In virtual reality, users are fully immersed (usually with the help of a headset) in a new visual and auditory experience. You may also hear of a “mixed reality” (MR) experience, which hybridizes AR and VR.
Depending on your goals, you can use extended reality to showcase new products, guide users on virtual tours, inform the public about a physical environment, or provide a pure entertainment experience. There’s almost no limit to what you can do.
How to Choose an Extended Reality Developer
Your extended reality experience’s quality and reception will depend on the quality of your extended reality developer, as well as the partnership you choose to form with them. Your most important considering factors should be:
Quality
Does this extended reality developer produce quality work? Do they have a team of qualified, experienced developers who can sculpt the kind of experience you want to provide? Will they provide high levels of testing and quality control?
Resources/capacity
What size team do they work with, and what are their capacity limits? Do you have a tight deadline you’re trying to meet?
Communication
How does this partner communicate with you? Do they treat your extended reality project as collaborative?
Our Extended Reality Development Process
At DEV.co, we understand that every extended reality development project is unique. That’s why we follow a guiding process to help us develop the right product for each partner.
Identification and analysis
We start by understanding your extended reality goals, and analyzing the best path forward.
Collaborative workshopping
Next, we begin workshopping ideas, working with you in a collaborative process to come up with the best possible AR or VR product.
Design and development
Once we’ve outlined our project scope, we begin designing and developing the core extended reality experience. This is followed by an exhaustive round of testing.
Launch
Once fully tested, it’s time to launch.
Testing
After the web application is completed, we’ll thoroughly test the app to make sure it works as intended.
Correction and support
Launch isn’t the end of the line; we continue to provide our extended reality clients with ongoing support.
Extended Reality Development Services
Our extended reality development services include:
- Augmented reality development
- Product design consultations
- Extended reality product setup and deployment
- Virtual reality development
- AR/VR technology consultations
- Extended reality integration in existing systems
Our Development
Process
Understanding
Background details
Vision & values
Target personas
Stakeholder insights
Research
Customer research
Competitive analysis
Expert audits & insights
Current market positioning
Strategy
Story & personality
Market opportunities
Positioning & messaging
Creative brief development
Creative
Naming
Logo development
Graphics standards
Verify function
Messaging framework
Deliver
Brand book & styleguide
Print integration
Online & mobile
Further brand extension
AR, VR and mixed reality — what the difference actually means for a build
The terms get used loosely in pitches and precisely in engineering, which is where budgets go wrong. The distinction that matters is how much of the real world the system has to understand.
Virtual reality replaces the environment, so you control everything and the hard problems are performance and comfort. Augmented reality overlays the environment, so the hard problem is tracking — the device has to agree with reality frame by frame. Mixed reality lets virtual objects be occluded by and interact with real geometry, which needs spatial mapping and is materially more expensive than either.
- VR — fully synthetic environment, headset required, 90fps floor or users feel sick.
- AR — overlay on a live camera feed, runs on phones people already own, tracking is the cost centre.
- MR — virtual objects occluded by real geometry, needs depth sensing and spatial mapping.
- Pick VR for training, simulation and anything where the real room is a distraction.
- Pick AR when reach matters more than fidelity — no hardware to buy is the whole advantage.
- Pick MR only when interaction with real objects is the product, not a demo flourish.
Contact With DEV.CO
Are you interested in improving your business or nonprofit organization with extended reality? Or do you have more questions about how AR and VR can benefit you?
Contact DEV.co today for a free quote, or a free consultation!
AR/VR questions we get before scoping a build
Carried over from the three AR/VR explainers this page absorbed.
VR replaces what you see; AR adds to it. In VR you wear a headset and the environment is entirely synthetic, so the engineering problems are rendering performance and motion comfort. In AR the device composites graphics onto a live camera feed, so the engineering problem is tracking — knowing precisely where the device is relative to the world, many times a second.
Commercially the difference is reach. AR runs on phones your users already carry. VR requires buying hardware, which turns a software decision into a procurement one.
Mixed reality is AR with real geometry understood well enough that virtual objects can be hidden behind real ones and can respond to real surfaces. That requires depth sensing and spatial mapping, which is a step change in cost over overlay AR.
It earns that cost when interacting with physical objects is the point — maintenance guidance on a real machine, surgical planning against a real body. It does not earn it when the virtual content would work just as well floating in front of the camera.
The durable use cases are training and simulation, remote assistance, and product visualisation before manufacture — all cases where the alternative is expensive physical setup. Those have survived several hype cycles because the return is measurable.
Consumer entertainment remains hardware-gated. If a business case depends on headset install base, treat the timeline as a risk rather than an assumption.
Overlay AR on existing phones starts around the cost of a normal mobile app plus the tracking work. VR and mixed reality run higher because 3D asset production, performance budgets and comfort testing are all real line items that have no equivalent in a standard app.
The cost driver nobody forecasts is 3D content. Software gets built once; the model library gets extended forever.