Singularity: Designing a Cooperative Mixed Reality Game for a Co-located Setting

"Singularity" is a design-focused paper describing a cooperative mixed reality game built for co-located play, in which a 2D physical-space game with tracked players is networked to a VR game played by one participant. The central aim is to explore how cooperation can be fostered when a VR player and several co-located players share a limited interaction space, while managing tracking latency and occlusion, proximity effects, motion sickness, and the mapping between physical and virtual space. The system uses isomorphic mapping between its two environments to support smooth transitions, and it assigns distinct abilities to each player type to encourage collaboration, such as co-located players forming laser connections and the VR player summoning allies for an area attack.

The evaluation rests on an expert review conducted with two specialists in virtual reality, covering the VR player's experience, communication between the environments, and usability and audiovisual presentation. The authors report that the evaluation identified specific areas for improvement while supporting the proof-of-concept. Notable findings include that proximity-based connection encourages collaboration but can render single-player mechanics obsolete, that a complex capture mechanic was often misunderstood and was ultimately judged too difficult, and that the controller-based input for VR avatar movement was suboptimal. Further recommendations concern tuning avatar speed and scale, drawing paths in space to convey positional information, adjusting color contrast, and providing dedicated audio for the VR player.

The paper's scope is confined to a single prototype and a small qualitative evaluation, so it offers design insight rather than generalizable quantitative results. Its conclusion is that linking a VR game to a co-located setting creates a new form of interaction that supports sociability, and it points to future work using mobile VR headsets that would let physically co-present players each view their own 3D game world.