A Research Platform for Studying Mixed-Presence Collaboration

In this paper, we present a research platform to support studying collaboration in hybrid and co-located scenarios. Mixed-presence collaboration includes various novel and exciting use cases, such as situated and immersive data analysis by multiple users. However, research in this emerging field is hindered by the technical complexity of the setups and often requires re-implementation of common features. We address this issue by contributing a toolkit and research platform for mixed-presence collaboration that serves as an extensible baseline implementation and enables fast prototyping for user studies in collaborative mixed reality. Furthermore, our platform provides adjustable parameters, such as types of avatars, audio source placement, or the amount of simulated network latency. This way, developers are supported in making design choices regarding typical, re-occurring technical challenges.