SocialMiXR: Facilitating Hybrid Social Interactions at Conferences

Hybrid options at conferences, which support in-person and remote attendance, have increasingly become the norm in order to broaden participation and promote sustainability. However, hybrid conferences are challenging, where in-person and remote attendees often have disjoint, parallel experiences with limited opportunity to interact with each other. To explore the potential for facilitating social interaction between in-person and remote conference attendees, we designed and built SocialMiXR, a research prototype that uses WebXR technologies to align the physical and virtual worlds into one hybrid space for socialization. We deployed SocialMiXR in a three-day field study with 14 in-person and remote attendees of an engineering conference. Our qualitative results demonstrate that participants felt they were together in the same conference experience, and formed meaningful connections with each other. At the same time, they faced difficulties balancing different realities and capabilities given their separate contexts. We discuss implications for the design of hybrid social experiences at conferences.