Many of our everyday experiences are shared with others. Such experiences are diverse, including for example collaborative work, lectures and museums visits, but also shared entertainment and many ordinary tasks. Immersive technologies have the potential to significantly influence and re-shape these scenarios. They have been increasingly employed to facilitate and study various shared experiences and user behavior, and may have vast implications to the future of such environments. A commonly studied area of shared experience is the collaboration of individuals on a common task. Given the ever-growing size of gathered datasets, research frequently pursues evaluation of data visualization and data analysis as such a collaborative tasks. However, creating such immersive environments is inherently difficult, and approaches by prior work assessing these tasks are often associated with limiting factors, such as flexibility, scalability, cost, and hence reproducibility.

Recent generations of consumer head mounted displays support “inside-out” markerless tracking, thereby removing limits on size and shape of the physical arena, and video pass-through, allowing the user to see a blend of the real and virtual world. Taken together, these two features permit the creation of entirely novel large-scale multi-user mixed reality experiences, in which existing architectural spaces can be transformed into immersive visualisation arenas.

This projects presents ViewR, an application to rapidly create shared co-located mixed reality (MR) experiences and experiments that can be replicated in any given physical environment, whilst utilizing affordable hardware. It focuses on producing synchronized multi-user in-situ experiences, and combines these with a hybrid-spaces approach, allowing developers and designers to blend the virtual and real world in numerous ways. Building upon ViewR, a wide range of applications and experiments can be facilitated quickly whilst ensuring reproducibility. Possible applications range from shared co-located collaborative data assessment, over hybrid lectures and persistent in-situ parallel worlds, to studies evaluating meaningful product labels for consumers to assess their ecological footprint.

ViewR forms a versatile foundational sandbox that accelerates the process of creating such co-located shared hybrid MR experiences and experiments. In doing so, ViewR encourages future research that shines light on the implications of MR technology, where it may be especially beneficial, and where other technology might be better suited.

— ViewR: A sandbox for **V**ersatile **I**nteractions and **E**xperiences in shared hybrid **W**orkspaces based on mixed **R**eality —