HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World
Authors: 
Harsh Vijay, Saumay Pushp, Amish Mittal, Praveen Gupta, Meghna Gupta, Sirish Gambhira, Shivang Chopra, Mayank Baranwal, Arshia Arya, Ajay Manchepalli, Venkata N. PadmanabhanAuthors Info & Claims
Harsh Vijay, Saumay Pushp, Amish Mittal, Praveen Gupta, Meghna Gupta, Sirish Gambhira, Shivang Chopra, Mayank Baranwal, Arshia Arya, Ajay Manchepalli, Venkata N. PadmanabhanAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 77, Pages 1 - 33
Editorial Notes
The authors have requested minor, non-substantive changes to the Version of Record and, in accordance with ACM policies, a Corrected Version of Record was published on July 11, 2023. For reference purposes, the VoR may still be accessed via the Supplemental Material section on this page.
Abstract
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.
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Version of Record for "HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World" by Vijay et al., Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 7, Issue 2 (IMWUT 7:2).
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- HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World
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Published: 12 June 2023
Published in IMWUT Volume 7, Issue 2
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