Situated VR: Toward a Congruent Hybrid Reality Without Experiential Artifacts

The vision of extended reality (XR) systems is living in a world where real and virtual elements seamlessly and contextually augment experiences of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. While this integration promises exciting opportunities for the future of XR, it comes with the risk of experiential distortions and feelings of dissociation, especially related to virtual reality (VR). When transitioning from a virtual world to the real world, users report of experiential structures that linger on, as sort of after images, causing disruptions in their daily life. In this work, we define these atypical experiences as experiential artifacts (EAs) and present preliminary results from an informal survey conducted online with 76 VR users to highlight different types of artifacts and their durations. To avoid disruptions caused by these artifacts and simultaneously increase the user’s sense of presence, we propose the idea of situated VR, which blends the real and virtual in novel ways that can reduce incongruencies between the two worlds. We discuss the implications of EAs, and through examples from our own work in building hybrid experiences, we demonstrate the potential and relevance of situated VR in the design of a future, more immersive, artifact-free hybrid reality.