Workshop on Collaborative Mixed Reality Environments (CoMiRE) Summary
Stephan G. Lukosch, Mark Billinghurst, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Leila Alem, Steven Feiner, Michael Prilla · 2016
The world is becoming more complex and problem solving often requires teams of experts to work together at the same or from different locations. To support this there is a need for collaborative tools, and a variety of teleconferencing and telepresence technologies have been developed. However, most of them involve some variation of traditional video conferencing, which has limitations, such as not being able to effectively convey spatial cues or share the user's task space. This workshop will focus on how these limitations can be overcome by using Mixed Reality (MR) technology, leading to the development of radically new types of collaborative experiences. Mixed Reality (MR) environments are those that present real world and virtual world objects together within a single display, encompassing Augmented Reality (AR) and Augmented Virtuality (AV), as well as Virtual Reality (VR). With Augmented Reality, virtual data is spatially overlaid on top of a live view of the real world. Augmented Virtuality (AV) refers to the merging of real world objects into a virtual world. Virtual Reality replaces the user's real environments with a computer-generated 3D virtual world and lets the user interact in that world. MR environments can be used to merge the shared perceived realities of different users, as well as enrich each user's own individual experience in a collaborative task. However, despite the potential that MR has for collaborative applications, MR research often focuses on individual usage and more exploration needs to be done on the potential of MR for creating innovative collaborative experiences. This workshop will bring together researchers who are interested in developing collaborative MR systems. We will build a picture of current and prior research on collaboration in MR, as well as set up a common research agenda for work going forward. This, in turn, can be used to grow the research community.