SurfShare: Lightweight Spatially Consistent Physical Surface and Virtual Replica Sharing with Head-mounted Mixed-Reality

Abstract: Shared Mixed Reality experiences allow two co-located users to collaborate on both physical and digital tasks with familiar social protocols. However, extending the same to remote collaboration is limited by cumbersome setups for aligning distinct physical environments and the lack of access to remote physical artifacts. We present SurfShare, a general-purpose symmetric remote collaborative system with mixed-reality HMDs. Our system shares a spatially consistent physical-virtual workspace between two remote users, anchored on a physical plane in each environment (e.g., a desk or wall). The video feed of each user’s physical surface is overlaid virtually on the other side, creating a shared view of the physical space. We integrate the physical and virtual workspace through virtual replication. Users can transmute physical objects to the virtual space as virtual replicas. Our system is lightweight, implemented using only the capabilities of the headset, without requiring any modifications to the environment (e.g. cameras or motion tracking hardware). We discuss the design, implementation, and interaction capabilities of our prototype, and demonstrate the utility of SurfShare through four example applications. In a user experiment with a comprehensive prototyping task, we found that SurfShare provides a physical-virtual workspace that supports low-fi prototyping with flexible proxemics and fluid collaborative dynamics.

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