Partially Blended Realities : Aligning Dissimilar Spaces for Distributed Mixed Reality Meetings

Grønbæk, Jens Emil and Pfeuffer, Ken and Velloso, Eduardo and Astrup, Morten and Sønderkær Pedersen, Melanie and Kjær, Martin and Gellersen, Hans and Leiva, German (2023) Partially Blended Realities : Aligning Dissimilar Spaces for Distributed Mixed Reality Meetings. In: CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems :. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . ACM, New York, 456:1-456:16. ISBN 9781450394215

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Abstract

Mixed Reality allows for distributed meetings where people's local physical spaces are virtually aligned into blended interaction spaces. In many cases, people's physical rooms are dissimilar, making it challenging to design a coherent blended space. We introduce the concept of Partially Blended Realities (PBR) — using Mixed Reality to support remote collaborators in partially aligning their physical spaces. As physical surfaces are central in collaborative work, PBR supports users in transitioning between different configurations of tables and whiteboard surfaces. In this paper, we 1) describe the design space of PBR, 2) present RealityBlender to explore interaction techniques for how users may configure and transition between blended spaces, and 3) provide insights from a study on how users experience transitions in a remote collaboration task. With this work, we demonstrate new potential for using partial solutions to tackle the alignment problem of dissimilar spaces in distributed Mixed Reality meetings.