Pass and Play in Mixed Reality: Unconventional Use of an MR Headset as a Shareable Display

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2024, examines how a single mixed reality (MR) headset can be used as a shareable display to support social "pass and play" gameplay among groups. The authors argue that conventional VR is socially isolating, with co-players typically reduced to spectators, and that video passthrough cameras in modern headsets offer an underused route to collective play. Their central aim is to identify the game mechanics, information-sharing strategies, and social conditions needed to make a single-headset, multi-player MR game work, and they present a prototype called "Next Player Please" (NPP) built to answer these questions.

NPP is a tabletop-based MR game in which players rotate control of one headset across rounds of mini-games. The active player wears the headset and sees a virtual playground overlaid on a physical table, while opposing players use a second controller to interfere with the active turn. Evaluation drew on surveys, observations, face-to-face interviews, and video analysis from playtests with 590 participants at game fairs and closed user sessions. The authors report that the active player should be given simple, quickly learned mechanics; that passthrough reduces isolation by letting the wearer keep seeing co-players; that spatial audio and voice cues can convey missing visual information to non-wearers; and that sharing a second controller lets non-wearers meaningfully interact, including deflecting projectiles or obstructing vision. A free-form social mode, where opponents distract the active player, emerged as a notable dimension of play.

The authors conclude that PAP-oriented MR design offers a distinctive collaborative paradigm that repositions the headset from an isolating device into a socially situated display. The findings are framed as initial and exploratory, drawn from a single prototype and largely qualitative observation, rather than as generalizable measurements of group engagement.