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

Abstract

Figure 1: In Partially Blended Realities, remote collaborators meet in a distributed Mixed Reality space composed of their local surfaces. Dissimilar rooms will only be partially blended. This creates a need for realigning when collaborators move from one surface to another. We developed RealityBlender to study the user experience and design space of partial alignment techniques.

Practice-informed Patterns for Organising Large Groups in Distributed Mixed Reality Collaboration

“…The ability of MR technologies to flexibly align real and digital objects across physical and virtual spaces [43,54] makes them an ideal medium for distributed collaboration. Unlike large multi-display environments, such as media spaces [5,51] or blended interaction systems [45], MR allows collaborators to digitally match misaligned spaces [7,13,20,46,48] or warp avatars' poses and movements so they point or turn in the 'correct direction' [31,58,60]. These embodied interactions [9] open new opportunities for improving remote collaboration because users can intuitively communicate using interactions so far only available in person, like pointing or moving toward an object [2,5,39,44,48].…”

“…This suggests the closer distributed MR gets to feeling co-located, the better people will perform in collaborative tasks. Further, collaborative interactions can be grounded in the physical room, providing natural haptic feedback when the user sits at a desk or draws on a whiteboard [20,45,51]. Grønbaek et al [20] showed that users reported a feeling of co-presence when the remote users' avatars were aligned with shared physical objects in MR.…”

“…Blending physical objects with the interactive environment allows natural embodied communication, such as pointing to an object or turning toward a focal point. Approaches to physical space alignment include warping the avatars' positions and gestures [31,58,60], digitally mapping and matching the distributed spaces [28,32] or aligning selected objects, such as a whiteboard or desk, across the different environments [20]. This alignment with the physical space, aided by MR technology, reconstructs spatial communication cues.…”

SurfaceCast: Ubiquitous, Cross-Device Surface Sharing

“…More recently, Apple DeskView [1] (part of Continuity Camera) uses the wide-angle camera in current iPhones to act as a webcam, capturing both the face of the user as well as part of the table surface in front of them, and streams a rectified view of the surface to the remote party. In addition, Grønbaek et al [12] present RealityBlender, a toolkit to (partially) align two remote mixed-reality spaces.…”

“…A second, public deployment of this scenario was installed in two separate locations at the Maker Faire in Aarhus, and was used by 11 groups of people, with 27 participants in total (four groups of children aged 9-14, and seven families with children aged [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Alongside a selection of Lego bricks and figures, we also provided paper and drawing pens on the "physical" side.…”