In AR you will see the couch you are sitting in, walls, floor, ceiling. You see wireless enabled electronic devices and their animated augmented reality icon that you can interact with without walking over to the actual device. Once you check into VR, the couch, walls, floor, ceiling and everything physical nearby drop from view, and instead you see the Matrix’s plane of stars. You are surrounded on all sides by less than human sized virtual representations of wireless enabled electronic devices of the real world. It is the very same device icons you would normally see and interact with when you overlay matrix information on your normal vision.
People in the matrix are represented by persona icons. Persona icons usually look just like the people they represent, sometimes with a splash of style like flashing eyes, hair coloring, or a tastefully understated aura. But there are also wilder looks out there, such as anime dolls, ninjas, robots and even monsters. One common thing is that all avatars are between a dwarf and troll size. Just like in AR some of them might be highlighted by a nice blue aura representing your friends.
You are not bound to physics and can fly up in the matrix sky if you like. If you do then, far below you, and in every direction wireless enabled electronic devices of the real world will lit up the landscape like a galaxy of stars.
Even from up here you notice that devices closest to your physical body are the brightest and clearest, but if you like you can travel to the distant horizon in a blink of an eye.
The farther away devices are from you in the real world, the dimmer their icons are in the Matrix; this is partly because your commlink figures the farther ones aren’t as interesting to you, but mostly because the connection is a bit slower due to the distance. Matrix gear renders the far-off devices and personas as dim, muted, or flickering icons
This is why devices at the horizon flicker and sputter with the lag of data travelling from the other side of the globe. In order to interact with a device icon this far from home require some skill and focus. You can zip to the horizon of the matrix while in AR as well, using a window or a camera view. Everything you can do in VR you can also do in AR, just that everything is so much faster and more fluent in VR as it feels like you are really there in first person rather than just viewing it from an augmented reality heads up display.
Even though you moved your perception to the edge of the Matrix you still have the same huge icons above you. The green tinted sky looks the same no matter where in the matrix you move your perception as long as you stay on the Seattle Local Grid. You never have a distance to a host. Speaking of Hosts. The huge icons up there are Hosts. Some large as the island of Manhattan or small cities, they belong to the Big Ten. Others, smaller, in the neural sky represent consumer products or hosts promising darker pleasures. This is the same hosts that you can observe and even enter by using augmented reality from your meat body, but in virtual reality it really feels like you are there.
Between it all are different processes... software... streams of data zip between icons and hosts. Data trails that lit up in different colors with the speed of light only to fade back.
AROs specifically are basically nothing else than public files anchored on physical devices. Normally you view them with augmented reality overlay on the real world that you have in line of sight and filter out the rest because it often make more sense to see the physical entrance to the pub that the giant ARO neon sign is pointing to than just seeing the neon sign ARO pointing down at a pub on the other side of the physical building, but if you like you can also view them from a distance using an augmented reality heads up display or view them while you are in VR.