Research Progress and Prospect of Extended Reality and Geospatial Cognition

Extended reality (XR), which covers augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR), serves geospatial applications well. Human's perception and cognition with XR has been a topic of continuous research and development for decades. With the emergence of "metaverse", this topic has attracted more and more researchers. This paper gives an overview of current progresses of XR and geospatial learning with an emphasis of its necessity. More specifically, we summarize the state of the art and trends of using VR and AR in geospatial cognition studies, the common research methods, devices, and tasks, with the aim to provide researchers with practical references. We also present a number of challenges and encourage cartography to participate in the XR development.