Towards Immersive Mixed Reality Street Play: Understanding Co-located Bodily Play with See-through Head-Mounted Displays in Public Spaces

We are witnessing an upcoming paradigm shift as Mixed Reality (MR) See-through Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) become ubiquitous, with use shifting from controlled, private settings to spontaneous, public ones. While location-based pervasive mobile games like Pokémon GO have achieved success, the embodied interaction of MRHMDs is moving us from phone-based screen-touching gameplay to MRHMD-enabled co-located bodily play. Major tech companies are continuously releasing visionary videos where urban streets transform into vast MR playgrounds—imagine Harry Potter-style wizard duels on city streets. However, few researchers have conducted real-world, in-the-wild studies of such Immersive Mixed Reality Street Play (IMRSP) in public spaces, anticipating a near future with prevalent MRHMDs. In this work, through empirical studies on a series of research-through-design game probes called Multiplayer Omnipresent Fighting Arena (MOFA), we gain an initial understanding of this under-explored area by identifying the social implications, challenges, and opportunities of this new paradigm. MOFA is open-sourced at https://github.com/realitydeslab/mofa.

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