Design of a Mixed Reality-Based Immersive Virtual Environment System for Social Interaction and Behavioral Studies

The advancements in immersive technologies allow us to create more sophisticated environments designed to help engage users by merging the physical world with a digital or simulated reality. These can range from completely immersive virtual environments to mixed reality immersive environments, where the virtual world and the real world collide. Virtual reality is a completely immersive environment where the users’ reality is replaced with a simulated environment, and the hardware works to convince the user that they are in a different world. In contrast, augmented reality is a mixed type of reality, combining both the virtual and the natural world by augmenting the real world with digital assets and components. While both types of experiences contribute to creating rich collaborative environments, a limitation, and sometimes inconvenience, is present with the requirement of wearing a head-mounted device (HMD), creating restriction that prevents users from having physical interactions with others. Rather than interacting in the virtual space, we propose a concept that provides the structure for a physical space where users can interact with the shared mixed reality environment, an environment projected to help create the collaborative aspect in this project without any wearable devices. This paper will present the developed system and implemented four-dimensional interactions and demonstrate the feasibility of the structured experience we have created.