XinReality
| XinReality | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Online wiki and reference website |
| Industry | Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality |
| Developer | Community of volunteer editors |
| Release Date | 2015 |
| Website | xinreality.com (now redirects to vrarwiki.com) |
XinReality was an online, community-edited wiki dedicated to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and the broader field of X Reality (XR). Hosted at the domain xinreality.com, it was the original name and home of the reference site that is now published as the VR & AR Wiki at vrarwiki.com. XinReality cataloged VR and AR hardware, software, companies, and concepts, and over time it grew into one of the larger enthusiast-maintained encyclopedias covering the field. The project was later renamed and moved to the vrarwiki.com domain, which is its direct continuation; requests to xinreality.com now redirect to the corresponding pages on vrarwiki.com.[1]
History
The xinreality.com domain was registered in January 2015, and the wiki was operating publicly and being indexed by the Internet Archive by May 2015.[2] Its launch coincided with the wave of consumer interest that followed the Oculus Rift development kits and the run-up to the first mass-market VR headsets, a period when reliable, consolidated information about the emerging hardware was scarce.
From the start the site described itself in plain terms. Its 2015 home page read: "XinReality is a VR and AR Wiki. Our mission is to collect, clarify and consolidate any and every bit of information related to virtual reality and augmented reality. We are a community wiki written and maintained by fans and enthusiasts."[2] The site was originally titled the "Virtual and Augmented Reality Wiki" and used the short name "VR & AR Wiki." Later branding expanded the scope label to cover VR, AR, and XR.
Content and scope
XinReality functioned as a structured encyclopedia rather than a blog or news outlet. Its coverage included:
| Area | Examples of coverage |
|---|---|
| Hardware | VR headsets, AR and smart glasses, controllers and input devices, and accessories |
| Companies | Manufacturers, platform holders, and studios across the VR and AR industry |
| Software | Applications, games, runtimes, and game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine |
| Concepts | Technical terms, display and tracking technologies, and the history of the medium |
A large share of the site's pages were individual entries for VR applications and games, many of them generated from storefront metadata, alongside detailed specification pages for headsets and glasses. This gave the wiki a deep, long-tail catalog of devices and titles that was difficult to find collected anywhere else.
Technology
XinReality was built on the MediaWiki software, the same platform that powers Wikipedia.[2] The site made heavy use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension, which let editors store structured data inside articles (for example a headset's resolution, field of view, or release date) and then generate sortable, queryable index pages from it. Many of the genre, platform, and play-style listing pages on the wiki are not hand-written lists but live semantic queries that assemble themselves from the data on individual article pages. Standardized infobox templates for devices, companies, software, and applications gave the catalog a consistent look and made its specifications machine-readable.
Transition to vrarwiki.com
The wiki continued to publish under the xinreality.com domain for roughly a decade, still serving its content directly there as late as early 2024.[3] In 2025 the project was relaunched under the new domain vrarwiki.com, which carries the site name "VR & AR Wiki"; the new domain first appears in Internet Archive captures in March 2025.[4]
vrarwiki.com is the direct successor to XinReality: it inherited the same article content, infobox templates, semantic catalog, and editing community. To preserve the value of years of inbound links and search rankings, xinreality.com was configured to issue permanent (HTTP 301) redirects that map each old article URL to the identical path on vrarwiki.com, so a saved or linked address such as xinreality.com/wiki/Oculus_Rift now resolves to vrarwiki.com/wiki/Oculus_Rift.[1] As of 2026 the successor site hosts more than 4,600 content articles.[5]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "xinreality.com article URLs return an HTTP 301 permanent redirect to the matching path on vrarwiki.com". https://xinreality.com/wiki/Oculus_Rift.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Main Page, Virtual and Augmented Reality Wiki (archived)". 2015-05-20. https://web.archive.org/web/20150520000813/http://xinreality.com/wiki/Main_Page.
- ↑ "Main Page (archived)". 2024-02-20. https://web.archive.org/web/20240220093650/https://xinreality.com/wiki/Main_Page.
- ↑ "VR & AR Wiki home (archived)". 2025-03-23. https://web.archive.org/web/20250323104318/http://vrarwiki.com/.
- ↑ "Statistics". https://vrarwiki.com/wiki/Special:Statistics.