Shared experiences

Original article: Shared experiences

TL;DR

In mixed reality, designing shared experiences hinges on understanding factors like sharing nature, group size, participant location, interaction timing, environment similarity, and device type. Technologies like Azure Spatial Anchors facilitate these shared holographic interactions. As this technology progresses, it’s set to revolutionize collaboration across numerous sectors.

Bullet points

  1. đŸ€ Shared Scenarios: Before diving into the world of mixed reality, it’s pivotal to outline the target scenarios. This means understanding the specific situations or use-cases you’re designing for. By doing this, designers and developers can pinpoint the core challenges and opportunities, ensuring a more streamlined and effective design process.

  2. 🔄 How are they sharing?
    • Presentation: A single entity (like a professor) showcases content to many. While the main content is visible to all, the presenter might have additional private notes.
    • Collaboration: Multiple users work together, like students collaborating on a holographic heart model to learn about surgeries.
    • Guidance: A more personalized approach where one individual guides another, akin to a professor guiding a student through a surgical procedure in a virtual environment.
  3. đŸ‘„ Group Size
    • 1:1: Personalized and direct, like a tutor-student setup.
    • Small (<7): Suitable for team projects or group discussions, where each member can contribute without overwhelming others.
    • Large (>=7): More complex, suitable for lectures or seminars. The larger the group, the more challenges arise, both technically and socially.
  4. 🌍 Location of Participants
    • Colocated: Everyone’s in the same room or area, fostering direct interaction.
    • Remote: Participants are scattered, perhaps in different parts of the world, relying heavily on the tech to interact.
    • Both: A hybrid model, like a team in a conference room collaborating with remote members.
  5. ⏰ Timing of Sharing
    • Synchronous: Everyone’s online and active together, like a live group video call.
    • Asynchronous: Participants interact at different times, akin to forum posts or email chains.
    • Both: A blend, like a professor leaving virtual notes on a student’s project to be viewed later.
  6. 🏠 Physical Environments
    • Similar: Environments with comparable features, like two different university lecture halls.
    • Dissimilar: Vastly different settings, like comparing a quiet study room to a bustling auditorium.
  7. đŸ“± Device Types
    • Immersive Devices: Offer a deep, all-encompassing digital experience.
    • Holographic Devices: Primarily display 3D digital images, enhancing the depth of the experience.
    • 2D Devices: Traditional screens like smartphones or desktops, which might offer a more limited experience compared to the other two.

  8. 🚀 Exploring Shared ExperiencesInnovations like Microsoft’s HoloLens showcase the potential of mixed reality. For instance, Skype on HoloLens allows a user to get guidance on fixing a light switch from a remote expert, blending the real and virtual seamlessly.

  9. 🛠 Building Shared Experiences: To create a cohesive mixed-reality experience, several technical aspects need to be addressed. This includes creating and joining sessions, aligning holograms in a shared space, synchronizing data in real-time, and ensuring data persistence across sessions.

  10. 📡 Tech Options: Tools like Azure Spatial Anchors and Photon SDK are at the forefront of mixed reality development. They allow for the creation of shared holographic experiences, from static holograms to fully interactive multi-user environments.

Keywords

  • Synchronous: Occurring at the same time.

  • Asynchronous: Not occurring at the same time.

  • Immersive Devices: Devices that provide a deeply engaging, multi-sensory, digital experience.

  • Holographic Devices: Devices that can display holograms, three-dimensional (3D) digital images that can be seen without special 3D glasses or other equipment.

  • HoloLens: A mixed reality smart-glasses developed by Microsoft, which provides holographic and mixed reality experiences.

  • Colocated: Participants or users are in the same physical space.

  • Azure Spatial Anchors: A cloud service by Microsoft Azure that allows developers to create mixed-reality apps that map, persist, and share 3D content.

  • Miracast: A standard for wireless connections from devices (like laptops, tablets, or smartphones) to displays (such as TVs, monitors, or projectors).

  • Photon SDK: A software development kit used for creating multiplayer games and real-time applications.

  • OnSight: A collaboration tool developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for scientists to collaborate in real-time within data from the Martian landscape.