Pass and Play in Mixed Reality: Unconventional use of a MRheadset as a shareable display

Within the context of "Virtual Reality(VR)", fluid social play among groups of people is still an unresolved domain.Compared to monitor displayed computer-and board-games, a VR experience offers a sensorily closed-off and socially isolated to strongly mediating experience.Promotional videos for VR headsets from the 2010s, for example, often show several people in the same living room.Only one person however wears the VR headset, while the others watch the video feed of the game on an external screen, only contributing to the game as spectators (Olbertz-Siitonen et al. 2021).The shared social experience is not of the game, but of observing it.To enable collective play, online setups, additional game controllers -for example, in games such as Keep Talking and Nobody Explode (Steel Crate Games 2015) and Acron: Attack of the Squirrels (Resolution Games 2019) -or multiple VR headsets that enable co-location (Born et al. 2019) are required.Currently, there is another generally underused possibility -that of video passthrough, which, thanks to built in cameras, allows VR headsets to function as "Mixed Reality (MR)" (Speicher et al. 2019) devices.These technologies are less isolating for the user by allowing them to see the real environment and the co-players while wearing them.At its core, MR Headsets are displays in front of the player's eyes with spatially tracked input devices.With this technology, game developers are challenged to think about how MR games can be created