Mixed reality and the Internet of Things: Bridging the virtual with the real

Abstract

As Mixed Reality applications penetrate people's daily activities, strong synergies with Geospatial technologies and the Internet of Things are revealed. The first is due to the significance of the spatial reference of all involved actors of a Mixed Reality environment: the end-user, the real and the virtual objects. The second is due to the ever-increasing participation of sensors controlling devices and machines always and everywhere. This paper highlights these synergies and proposes a case proving they crucially empower a Mixed Reality experience. Through this synergy, a novel interaction method for Mixed Reality Environments emerges, the “physical task execution” interaction method. An open-source application prototype was developed to support the case study where we assign a physical task to a virtual man to execute, utilising the Internet of Things in a Mixed Reality Environment.