Lessons from the lighthouse: collaboration in a shared mixed reality system

Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visitors. This paper presents a study of a mixed reality system that allows web, virtual reality and physical visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. Our system allows visitors to share their location and orientation, communicate over a voice channel, and jointly navigate around a shared information space. Results from a study of 34 users of the system show that visiting with the system was highly interactive and retained many of the attractions of a traditional shared exhibition visit. Specifically, users could navigate together, collaborate around objects and discuss exhibits. These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration, and how `hybrid objects' can support collaboration at-a-distance. Keywords Virtual reality, WWW, museum visiting, mixed reality, location-awareness, context-aware...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Barry Brown, Ian MacColl, Matthew Chalmers, Areti Galani, Cliff Randell, Anthony Steed
• Keywords: CHI 2003, Conventional Physical Visitors, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality