HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World

We present HyWay, short for "Hybrid Hallway", to enable mingling and informal interactions among physical and virtual users, in casual spaces and settings, such as office water cooler areas, conference hallways, trade show floors, and more. We call out how the hybrid and unstructured (or semi-structured) nature of such settings set these apart from the all-virtual and/or structured settings considered in prior work. Key to the design of HyWay is bridging the awareness gap between physical and virtual users, and providing the virtual users the same agency as physical users.

To this end, we have designed HyWay to incorporate reciprocity (users can see and hear others only if they can be seen and heard), porosity (conversations in physical space are porous and not within airtight compartments), and agency (the ability for users to seamlessly move between conversations). We present our implementation of HyWay and the user survey findings from multiple deployments in unstructured settings (e.g., social gatherings), and semi-structured ones (e.g., a poster event).

Results from these deployments show that HyWay enables effective mingling between physical and virtual users.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools; * All the authors were with Microsoft Research India during their involvement in this work. The authors, other than the last two, are listed in reverse alphabetical order. They contributed in various ways, including: †: building the initial, functional HyWay system. ‡: building subsequent refinements and augmentations to the HyWay system. #: deploying HyWay in various settings. §: conducting user studies. ¶: creating maps and visualization. As for the last two authors, their roles were: **: contributing to the design of HyWay and being the primary driver of the deployments. + : conceiving HyWay and its main design elements, and leading the overall project.