A 2-year International Postdoc grant was rewarded to Jens Emil Grønbæk in 2023 from DFF Independent Research Fund Denmark. This was the grant that kickstarted the idea for The Blended Realities Collective.
Blended Realities for Distributed Team Collaboration
Emily Wong, Adélaïde Genay, Jens Emil Sloth Grønbæk, and Eduardo Velloso. 2025. Spatial Heterogeneity in Distributed Mixed Reality Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 980, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714033
This goal of Blended Realities is to enable flexible and spatial team collaboration over distance through XR.
Work is becoming more distributed with teams of people working together on mixed digital and physical tasks over distance. For instance, manufacturing companies need to supply expertice to remote physical problem-solving without transporting the limited ressources of experts around the globe. In these contexts, collaboration is typically asymmtric where the physical task and several workers reside in one location, while remote experts have insufficient access to the workers’ task spaces. I will leverage my previous research on collaboration spaces to develop new eXtended Reality (XR) technologies that aim to solve these challenges. The project forms a new research agenda – Blended Realities – which will result in new interaction technologies for distributed XR as well as theoretical contributions to how people use physical space for distributed collaboration.
The DFF grant funded a stay with Prof. Eduardo Velloso and other XR experts at the University of Melbourne in Austrialia, which enabled the pursuit of the described research agenda.
Explore the outcomes of the project here.