Objective reality

Objective reality is the real world. It is our physical surroundings. One definition of objective reality is the collection of things that we are sure exist independently of us. Every person is able, in principle, to verify every aspect of the objective reality. That definition comes from a personal essay by Joan Vaccaro of Griffith University, which adds that anything that cannot be verified in this way is not part of the objective reality. In philosophy, the corresponding position is called realism: the claim that objects exist and that their existence and properties are independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices and conceptual schemes.

By contrast virtual reality is not the real world. It does not constitute our physical surroundings. VR is experienced through HMDs. The experience is highly individualized.

In VR and augmented reality research the idea appears in operational form. Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino's 1994 taxonomy of mixed reality displays defines real objects as "any objects that have an actual objective existence", and places environments made only of such objects at one end of the reality-virtuality continuum. Psychological studies have measured how time in a headset changes a person's felt sense of the physical world afterwards, and philosophers such as David Chalmers have argued that virtual objects are themselves real.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every new claim against the cited sources: the Vaccaro essay (archived), SEP Realism entry, Milgram and Kishino 1994 text, Aardema 2010 and Slater 2009 PubMed abstracts, Peckmann 2022 coverage in MIXED and PsyPost, Knibbe 2018 abstract, Azuma 1997 survey, Skarbez 2021 article, Chalmers 2017 paper and the Reality+ book page, plus Crossref bibliographic data. About review dates.

Real and virtual objects

Milgram and Kishino adopted two operational definitions for their taxonomy. Real objects are "any objects that have an actual objective existence", while virtual objects "exist in essence or effect, but not formally or actually". A real object can be observed directly or sampled (for example by a video camera or scanner) and then resynthesised on a display. A virtual object cannot be sampled and must be simulated from a description or model, since "in essence it does not exist".

The authors separated this distinction from the question of image quality. For realism, the standard of comparison is direct viewing of a real object through air or glass, which they call "unmediated reality", following Naimark (1991). Because synthesised images of non-existent objects can be made to look very realistic, they argued that an image that "looks real" does not show that the object it depicts is real.

On their virtuality continuum, real environments consist solely of real objects. That end includes both direct viewing of a real scene and viewing the same scene on an ordinary video display. Virtual environments consist solely of virtual objects, such as a conventional computer graphic simulation. A mixed reality environment presents real and virtual objects together in a single display, anywhere between the two extremes.

Objective reality and virtual reality

Researchers have found that individuals who have been immersed in VR have reduced sense of presence when they are back in objective reality. In the 2010 study by Frederick Aardema and colleagues at the Fernand-Seguin Research Center in Montreal, a nonclinical sample of 30 people completed measures of dissociation, sense of presence and immersion before and after an immersion in a virtual environment. Their scores showed an increase in dissociative experience (depersonalization and derealization), including a lessened sense of presence in objective reality. People with higher existing levels of dissociation, and those who were more easily absorbed or immersed, showed larger increases. The authors discussed the results in terms of imaginative processes and their possible implications for treating anxiety disorders with VR.

A 2022 randomised controlled trial at University Hospital Bonn, by Carina Peckmann, Niclas Braun and colleagues, compared 80 psychiatrically healthy participants who played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim either in VR (Skyrim VR) or on a standard PC monitor, 40 per group. Participants filled in the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale immediately before playing, immediately after, one day later and one week later. Depersonalization and derealization rose right after play in both groups, with a larger increase in the VR group, and VR players rated the game as more real. The team reported the symptoms as mild and short-lived, below clinical significance, and found no evidence of a long-term effect after a single VR session. The authors noted that the study used only one game and only healthy participants, and that long-term effects and effects in risk groups remain uncertain.

The return to the physical world has also been studied directly. At CHI 2018, Jarrod Knibbe, Jonas Schjerlund, Mathias Schmidt Petræus and Kasper Hornbæk used explicitation interviews to examine the moment users exit VR across four applications. They grouped the experience into five components: space, control, sociality, time and sensory adaptation. Participants described spatial disorientation regardless of how complex the virtual scene had been, and a window across which they left VR, for example mentally first and then physically. The paper proposed six designs for easing or heightening that exit.

Mel Slater describes two components of realistic responses to immersive VR: place illusion, the sensation of being in a real place, and plausibility illusion, the illusion that the depicted scenario is actually occurring. In both cases, Slater writes, the participant knows for sure that they are not "there" and that the events are not occurring.

Objective reality and augmented reality

Augmented reality keeps objective reality in view. In his 1997 survey, Ronald Azuma contrasts it with virtual environments, which "completely immerse a user inside a synthetic environment" so that the user cannot see the real world. AR instead lets the user see the real world with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with it, so that it "supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it". Azuma's three defining characteristics of AR are that it combines real and virtual, is interactive in real time, and is registered in 3-D. He describes AR as a "middle ground" between completely synthetic virtual environments and completely real telepresence, citing Milgram's work. The same survey notes that graphic overlays might also be used to remove or hide parts of the real environment from the user (see diminished reality).

In 2021, Richard Skarbez, Missie Smith and Mary C. Whitton revisited the continuum in Frontiers in Virtual Reality. They argued that even Ivan Sutherland's hypothetical Ultimate Display would still be mixed reality, because a system that controls all the exteroceptive senses still cannot control interoceptive senses such as the vestibular and proprioceptive senses. They also pointed out that the display devices of conventional VR are themselves real objects situated in the real environment. On this reading, virtual content is always ultimately situated in the real world, and conventional virtual reality falls within mixed reality. The only exception they allow is a system like the Matrix films, where direct brain stimulation replaces both interoceptive and exteroceptive input.

Philosophical debate

The contrast between objective reality and virtual reality is itself contested. Chalmers notes that the most common view treats virtual reality as a fictional or illusory reality, and cites William Gibson's description of cyberspace in Neuromancer as a "consensual hallucination". Against this he defends "virtual realism": virtual objects really exist, events in virtual reality really take place, experiences in virtual reality are non-illusory, and virtual experiences are as valuable as non-virtual ones. He calls the opposing package "virtual irrealism". In his account, virtual objects are digital objects constituted by computational processes on a computer, and to a first approximation they can be regarded as data structures. He calls the combined claims that virtual objects really exist as digital objects and that virtual events are largely digital events that really take place "virtual digitalism".

Chalmers also discusses mind-independence, which is often invoked as a criterion for being real. Virtual worlds, unlike dream worlds, do not depend on the user's own mind, which he gives as one sense in which even a stable dream world would be less real than a virtual one. His conclusion is that virtual reality need not be a "second-class reality". It may be a second-level reality, contained within physical reality and realized by physical processes, without being less real or less valuable for that reason.

Chalmers expanded these arguments in the book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, published by W. W. Norton in the US and Allen Lane in the UK on 25 January 2022. Its central thesis is that "virtual reality is genuine reality". He uses the title term for "physical reality combined with the metaverse of augmented and virtual realities", and argues that even if we cannot know we are not in a simulation (the simulation hypothesis), the world around us would still be real.

See also

• Reality-virtuality continuum
• Presence
• Derealization
• Mixed reality
• Diminished reality
• Simulation hypothesis