Fragmented Boundaries-Mixing realities by replaying virtual worlds in real spaces

摘要: The technique of fragmented boundaries is a recent development, linking and overlaying a physical environment with its equivalent virtual world. We present the concept, and describe an early demonstration of using multiple fragmented mixed reality boundaries. This technique highlights the hybrid approach of SHAPE for mixing realities, and complements the mixing of modalities described in the previous chapter. The concept of fragmented boundaries extends our own work on mixed reality. A mixed reality boundary is a kind of interface that joins a physical space to a virtual space such that the two appear to become adjacent. The first mixed reality boundaries were simple windows between the two so that the occupants of each could see into the other (those in the physical would see a projection of the virtual and those in the virtual would see an embedded live video image of the physical). Later boundaries refined this through the idea of boundaries having different properties–permeability, situation, dynamics, symmetry and representation (Benford et al., 1998)–leading to new kinds of boundaries such as traversable interfaces that create the illusion of participants crossing between virtual and physical (Koleva et al., 2000). Rather than solely concatenating physical and virtual spaces, this document describes how several different fragments of a mixed reality boundary can be used to connect a physical space to a virtual space at several locations so as to create the illusion that the two spaces are overlaid one on the other. The core idea can be summarised as follows:Choose a physical space Build its virtual equivalent as a Collaborative Virtual …