Designing for Mixed Reality

Chapter 5. Future Fictions Around the Principles of Interaction

Remain calm, serene, always in command of yourself. You will then find out how easy it is to get along.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Frameworks for Guidance: Space, Motion, Flow

The real world—use it!

The physical environment will serve to help reinforce context around virtual objects, fixing their placement and positioning. Utilizing real-world objects and using them as anchors for virtual objects could allow a person wearing a mixed reality (MR) headset to have a more contextual understanding of anything she might encounter in the space. One technological challenge is object drift, which is when a virtual object seems unattached from the environment. This can have the side effect of breaking the immersiveness and believability of an experience. The other side effect is limiting the virtual visual pollution that poses a great barrier to social acceptance. These are virtual objects and data drifting around real world spaces, potentially having pileups of virtual objects with little context as to what they are and why they are there. This kind of visual overload is perfectly laid out in director Keiichi Matsuda’s short film Hyper-Reality. The film provides a really compelling reason to make sure the real world is not stuffed-to-the-gills with random virtual objects and data. It is up to the designer to ensure that the interfaces remain calm and coherent within the context of use and to respect the physical environment ...