Is it real? Understanding Interaction Mechanics within the Reality-Virtuality Continuum

The concept of Mixed Reality has existed in research for decades but has experienced rapid growth in recent years, mainly due to technological advances and peripherals such as the Microsoft HoloLens reaching the market. Despite this, certain design aspects of Mixed Reality experiences, such as the different nuances of real and virtual elements, remain largely unexplored. This paper presents an explorative study with 15 participants which aims to investigate and gain a better understanding of the different qualities of real and virtual objects. To that end, we developed a Mixed Reality board game that offered different combinations of real and virtual game components, such as the board, the pieces and the dice. Our analysis shows that the participants generally preferred the completely virtual variant but appreciated different qualities of real and virtual elements. The results also indicate that virtual interaction elements work better on a real background than vice versa. However, this conflicts with some participants' preference of using physical pieces for the haptic experience, creating a design trade-off. This study represents a first step in exploring how the experience changes when swapping elements of differing realities for one another and identifying these trade-offs.