Achieving Congruency in Social MR within Heterogenous Spaces: Static Virtual Anchors for Seamless Tabletop Experiences

Mixed reality (MR) offers transformative potential for social interaction by blending physical and virtual worlds. However, achieving congruent shared experiences is challenging as virtual elements must seamlessly integrate with multiple users’ diverse, often conflicting, physical environments. While universal solutions for all social MR scenarios remain elusive, we argue that for specific, common interaction paradigms — such as a seated, tabletop chess application — a more robust congruency can be achieved. We propose a conceptual shift towards using static virtual anchors as the primary reference points within the shared MR space. Instead of users independently manipulating shared virtual objects for local calibration, they align and scale themselves relative to a stationary virtual scene yielding a congruent MR experience despite using differently sized chessboards. Moreover, because chess interaction is primarily local to each player, individual physical pieces can provide congruent haptic feedback. The proposed concept was implemented and is available on the Meta Horizon platform.