Glossary
Spatial computing glossary
A working glossary of the terms you'll see across spatial computing, XR analytics and immersive UX coverage on SpatialXRJournal.
- Anchor
- A fixed reference point in physical space that a device can find again across sessions. Used to keep virtual content stable in the real world.
- Field of view (FOV)
- The angular extent of the visible world a headset displays. Larger FOV generally feels more immersive but costs resolution and battery.
- Foveated rendering
- Rendering the area you're looking at in high detail while reducing detail elsewhere, using eye-tracking. A core efficiency technique on Vision Pro and Quest Pro.
- Hand tracking
- Detecting finger positions and gestures without a controller. Vision Pro and Quest both ship strong hand tracking as a primary input.
- Heatmap (spatial)
- A visualization of where users looked, dwelled or moved inside a 3D scene. Different mental model from web heatmaps — see our guide.
- Immersive UX
- The design discipline focused on interfaces that exist in three-dimensional space rather than on flat screens.
- OpenXR
- An open, royalty-free standard from the Khronos Group for spatial computing runtimes. Lets the same app target Quest, Vision Pro, Android XR and more.
- Passthrough
- Showing the real world inside a headset using outward-facing cameras. Enables mixed-reality experiences.
- Presence
- The feeling of being inside a virtual or mixed-reality environment. The most cited — and least standardized — metric in XR.
- Scene understanding
- The device's model of the surrounding space: floors, walls, furniture. Required for stable anchoring and realistic occlusion.
- Six degrees of freedom (6DoF)
- Tracking that captures both rotation and position. The baseline expectation for modern spatial computing headsets.
- Telemetry
- The structured event stream a device or app emits about sessions, inputs and behavior. The foundation of XR analytics.