Mixed reality can give people different views of the same space.

Perceptual conflicts reduce synchrony and increase mental effort during collaboration.

People don’t lose trust, but they lose confidence in decisions made together.

Designing mixed reality systems requires protecting the shared reality collaboration depends on.

You are sitting across from a colleague at a table. Though you’re both wearing virtual reality headsets, you can see the room around you—it's just that on the table in front of you floats a cluster of digital objects, either red spheres or blue cubes. This is what mixed reality does: It blends physical environments and digital objects, allowing the digital and the physical to coexist and interact.

Now, your colleague sitting across the table points to a blue sphere on the left. But you don’t see a sphere there, you see a cube. The conversation falters, and you wonder, are they mistaken? Are you? Or is the technology showing two different realities at once?

Mixed reality lets people collaborate in shared digital spaces layered onto the physical world, but the very flexibility that makes these systems powerful also raises the question of what happens when people in the same physical environment are not seeing the same reality?

Recent research enacting this scenario reveals an answer that informs us about how humans build a shared understanding of the world.

The Invisible Contract of Shared........

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