Blending Realities for Interaction across Distributed Group Environments

Objective

Creative problem-solving in face-to-face collaboration relies on spatiality, which is lacking in current distributed collaboration tools. What if distributed groups could blend their physical spaces to collaborate as if they were face-to-face? Mixed Reality (MR) offers this potential by arranging collaborators’ avatars around shared physical surfaces like desks and whiteboards. Proxemics theory highlights that this spatial arrangement makes collaboration effective. But when distributed space arrangements are dissimilar, it causes spatial incongruencies in collaboration cues, such as pointing gestures. To address this challenge, BRIDGE will develop a novel approach to distributed MR collaboration – Blended Proxemics – that blends people’s real physical surface interactions into a dynamic environment for group collaboration. By supporting MR users in adapting the mapping between surfaces, solutions will be able to scale beyond two users across similar spaces, to groups across dissimilar spaces. Additionally, BRIDGE will address a timely paradox: despite the hype on MR collaboration, we still have no lived experience with how it might change distributed collaboration practices. BRIDGE will establish a novel MR Living Lab to validate the effectiveness of solutions against real work environments with stakeholders. Achieving the goals of BRIDGE requires taking the risk to change both the conceptual, technical, and methodological foundations of the field. Therefore, BRIDGE will (1) develop Blended Proxemics as a new theory for spatial congruency in blended collaboration, providing a taxonomy for researchers to explore solutions, (2) invent new adaptive space mapping techniques and validate their effectiveness for group creativity, and (3) identify real-world barriers to collaborative MR adoption through the Living Lab. BRIDGE results will radically change how we approach distributed MR collaboration research, paving the way for adoption in real-world distributed teamwork.