What is IR that doesn't mean infrared?

Typo, meant MR, or mixed reality.

Any idea how that is different than AR? Or know any articles talking about the two.

It's an intentional branding effort undertaken by Magic Leap to associate 6DOF HMD AR with the term MR instead of AR - and thus associate only themselves with the term like "Kleenex." Typical propaganda effort. Apparently it worked because Wired picked up the term and others like Robert Scoble did as well. FWIW they failed previously by trying it with "Cinematic Reality," but nobody bit.

The theory is that the term Augmented Reality has too much associated baggage accumulated over the years from implementations that don't do realistic 6DOF.

So they are trying to say - approximately - that anything that doesn't have depth is AR and anything that does is MR.

Graeme Devine made this distinction by throwing shade at the iterations of mobile AR from previous generations that didn't have SLAM or any kind of tracking in a recent talk [1].

In reality MR was defined by Paul Milgram in 1994, and does well to describe the spectrum that encompasses Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality and Virtual Reality.

[1]https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-provides-updates-dice-su...

"IR" - for "input reality" - might be a sensible alternative term for this. VR and AR seem to focus on the display aspects, while the likes of Magic Leap are useful in the input aspects (which have their own sets of problems).

You are likely confusing Magic Leap with Leap Motion, which is specifically a tool to aid in Augmented Virtuality.

You're probably right. Whoops.

Ah, as I expected.

The only reference I've been able to find refers to IR as Immersive Reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UQK_ksU3kc http://www.horizonirs.com/vr-ar-ir-mr-vw-hmd-hud-whaaaat-2/