Design for Collaboration in Mixed Reality: Technical Challenges and Solutions

One of the key challenges in the rapid technological advance of Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) concerns the design of collaborative experiences. VR systems do not readily support team collaboration because they tend to focus on individual experiences and do not easily facilitate naturalistic collaboration. MR environments provide solutions for collaborative experiences, but establishing smooth communication between hardware components and software modules faces a major hurdle. This paper presents the background to and main challenges of an ongoing project on collaboration in an MR lab, aiming to design a serious 'team collaboration' game. To this end, we utilized a common game engine to engineer a cost-effective solution that would make the game playable in a configuration operated by WorldViz and Volfoni equipment. Evaluation of various solutions in the development process found a Unity 3D Cluster Rendering Beta solution to be the most cost-effective and successful.