Bridging Contextual Gaps Through Blended Reality Spaces 67 Bridging Contextual Gaps Through Blended Reality Spaces In most current mixed realities our sense of presence, of being somewhere, is split between the physical world and the virtual environments created by technology. Tangibility has been suggested as an approach to this problem (e.g. Ishii 2008)and in the HCI literature it is described as being built upon sophisticated skills situating digital information,to varyingextents,in physicalspace.Buttheapproachissubject to our currentlimited abilities to representchangesin materialorphysicalproperties of objects and spaces (Hoshi et al. 2009). We often find a lack of tangibility in our everyday lives with digital artefacts. At the same time, our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded with digital information from environmentally built-in media devices such as high definition displays, automated systems and sensor- based environments. Further, information surrounding us is often displayed in the periphery as well as to the focus of our attention. It is vitally important that the emerging trend towards tangibility is provided using the most appropriate combinations of the physical and virtual. This is especially true for people with special needs in their everyday lives, which is the main motivation for our work in this area. Blended reality spaces, evoking optimal tangible presence, carry the potential to make full use of, while not overburdening, the flexible but limited capacities of selective attention. In the terminology of blend theory, blended reality spaces can be described as newemergentspaces that are immersive, interactive and body-movementoriented, and where there will be little or no conscious effort of action or access to information. The user perceives and acts directly, as in everyday life unmediated activities (Fig. 5.3). We see the first examples of this in some commercial games that have been successfully applied to training people with sensorimotor disorder or with cognitive dementia. In typical examples of both Nintendo’s Wii™(Nintendo Inc., Kyoto, Japan) and somevideo-capturegames, the players have no direct physical connection with the gameenvironment.Their physical movementsare detected by either the ‘Wiimote’ (the Wii remote control) or by a camera. Body movements carried out by players are done in response to game-initiated events. When their free body movements in physical space are tracked and used as inputs to the game, a truly merged physical/mediaspace is created duringplay, and this is a blended reality space. This interaction style is formed in the harmony between the physical and the virtual, utilizing tangible interaction. In a true blending of the physical and the virtual there will be little or no gap between the emergent virtual/physical space of technology andthe physical world (Fig. 5.1). Adopting the PACT (people, activities, contexts, and technologies) framework for HCI introduced by Benyon et al. (2004), blended reality space can be described as in Fig. 5.4. It is about harmonizing these four elements within various domains. Webelievethat true blended reality space will release human actions from physical constraintsandthephysical-virtualdisruption,andprovidenaturalaflowofactions, equivalent to those in the physical world.