Milgram and Kishino’s Reality-Virtuality continuum — a single line running from the fully physical world to a fully virtual one, with augmented reality and augmented virtuality plotted somewhere in between — has been the field’s default mental model for describing XR systems since 1994. A paper posted to arXiv on October 27, accepted for the Student Research Consortium at IndiaHCI 2026 (running October 29–31 at IIT Hyderabad), argues that single line stopped being enough a while ago.
The author, Rajashekhar Vachiravelu Saminathan, points to a specific gap: XR systems don’t just vary in how much of what you perceive is real versus synthetic. Some systems add information to a real scene (the standard AR overlay), some suppress it (diminished reality, where real objects are edited out of what you see), and some do something closer to transforming what’s already there rather than cleanly adding or subtracting. A 1D continuum has no way to represent that distinction — it can only tell you how much virtual content is present, not what kind of operation is happening to the real world underneath it.
The fix is a second axis. The first dimension keeps doing what the original continuum did: locating a technology’s position between fully real and fully virtual. The new second dimension captures information addition versus subtraction. Plotted against each other, the two axes produce room for seven distinct XR paradigms rather than the familiar three or four: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Phenomenal Reality, Annexing Reality, and Diminished Reality — several of which have no clean home on the original single-axis model, which is presumably why they get discussed informally rather than located precisely in most XR writing.
Whether a two-axis grid is the right number of dimensions, or just one more than the original, is exactly the kind of thing a venue like IndiaHCI’s Student Research Consortium exists to pressure-test — it’s a forum built around early-stage work getting direct feedback before it goes further. The paper is a preprint with no peer-reviewed venue publication yet beyond that acceptance, so treat the seven-paradigm framework as a proposal being put in front of a room, not a settled taxonomy.
What makes it worth watching regardless: this site has already covered a separate, unrelated team’s study on adaptively sliding along the original Reality-Virtuality continuum at runtime — which only makes sense as a research question if you accept the continuum has just one dimension to slide along in the first place. A two-dimensional version of the same concept would change what “sliding along it” even means, which is the kind of foundational disagreement that’s worth having out loud before more work gets built on top of either framing.
Related Reading
- Beyond the 1D Reality-Virtuality Continuum: A 2D Framework for Seven Extended Reality Paradigms — arXiv:2610.36674
- IndiaHCI 2026 — SIGCHI listing
- Should the Amount of Virtuality Change While You Work? — our earlier coverage of adaptive XR modality
- Milgram & Kishino’s original Reality-Virtuality continuum — Wikipedia