Exploring Social Interaction with Asymmetrical XR through the Playful Cabinet of Curiosities Experience

This paper presents the design, development, and preliminary qualitative evaluation of an asymmetric, co-located Extended Reality (XR) experience inspired by the historical curatorial paradigm, namely the Cabinets of Curiosities. The research investigates whether the introduction of design asymmetries can encourage social interaction and collaborative meaning-making within a cultural space. This interaction design scenario involves a pair of participants who share an experience in a virtual environment filled with technological artifacts from the 1980s. A key aspect of our approach is the unstructured and guideless asymmetrical setup where one of the participants uses a VR headset and the other partakes in the experience via a 2D projection in the physical space. In order to test our hypothesis, we developed two versions of the experience; the first provided guided experience with instructions and notes, whereas the second offered no guidance or information. The initial findings suggest that the combination of asymmetrical design and lack of guidance enhances interactions and encourages the dialogue between participants. Our research highlights the potential of asymmetric XR to challenge isolating and overinterpreted VR paradigms and suggests that interaction design can be informed by historical curation paradigms creatively to encourage social exploration of cultural content.