Coupling Co-presence in Physical and Virtual Environments Toward Hybrid Places

Recent advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) including Internet-of-Things (IoT), Extended Reality (XR), and Digital Twins (DT) enabled a massive leap toward the coupling of physical and virtual systems for working, living, learning, and playing. Current approaches mostly focus on augmenting physical environments with digital information to improve the design and operations of buildings and cities. Fewer approaches explored a deeper integration of physical and virtual environments to create places for meaningful social interactions across realities. In this paper, we discuss the concept of ‘hybrid places’ that couple elements of physical and virtual places to unlock new opportunities for situated social interactions. Specifically, we conceptualize a framework for hybrid places where a virtually-augmented physical place (the hybrid-physical) and a physically-augmented virtual place (the hybrid-virtual) dynamically interact to enable co-presence across realities. Following, we demonstrate a preliminary workflow where the presence of people in a physical place is detected through occupancy sensors and displayed in the coupled virtual place through VR technology; the presence of people in the virtual place is then displayed in the coupled physical place through AR technology. This paper aims at revisiting the concept of ‘place’ considering recent technology developments, and laying the foundation for future work that will explore the benefits and opportunities for hybrid places to promote social interactions and collaboration across physical and virtual realms.