The Jamais Vu Effect: Understanding the Fragile Illusion of Co-presence in Mixed Reality

Collaboration in distributed mixed reality (MR) creates co-presence illusions by bringing a digital representation of the remote collaborator into the local user's physical space. However, constraints in each physical environment, such as different spatial layouts and furniture, can hinder collaboration and momentarily breaks the illusion of co-location. Since the remote user's physical space is invisible to the local user, the source of the interaction problem is often imperceptible, leading to familiar real-world interactions suddenly feeling unfamiliar---a concept we term the Jamais Vu Effect. In this paper, we conceptualise and demonstrate this effect through a five-part user study that elicits the user experience of the Jamais Vu Effect in MR. We contribute a shared vocabulary and understanding of spatial interface design challenges to help designers and researchers discuss and improve distributed collaboration in MR.