The vision of Blended Realities can be described as the following user experience for distributed team collaboration.
Each member of a team should perceive their distributed team members as being in the same physical space as them.
To realise this, the Mixed Reality interface must create the illusion of a blended space, which adheres to the following principles of embodied collaboration.
- Congruent: Shared spatial referencing and attentional consistency in the task environment, enabling meaningful deixis around shared objects.
- Contextual: Users’ avatars should behave contextually appropriate through proxemic relations and other non-verbal cues.
- Informal: Users should be able to interact in large groups through dynamic small-group formation and fluid turn-taking within smaller groups.
- Tangible: Shared tangible, physical and bodily access by distributed users. Physical features and objects of the environments in both locations are important and relevant to the underlying collaboration.
- Synchronous: Users should be able to remain co-present across time, i.e., time zone differences should not be a barrier to experiencing the feeling of co-presence among distributed team members.
- Fluid: Users should be able to seamlessly transition between tasks and applications both within MR and between MR and other modalities.