Mixed Reality Environments for Well-being

The increasing ubiquity of interactions as a mix between digital content and physical objects and how we transition between these spaces brings about new challenges for human-centered researchers, designers, and practitioners. Although there are many examples of ubiquitous computing products and services there is a need to further investigate how to design for and evaluate digital systems that map onto physical places, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not fully consider how to carefully and strategically design mixed reality experiences that develop into meaningful relationships between people and technology.

Providing an accessible and well-grounded approach to the design, development, and evaluation of mixed reality systems, products, and services guides us in the design of seamless user experiences that bring digital and physical spaces together and how we transition between them. Through this approach, we design experiences in a thoughtful and harmonized way, rather than bolting-on digital content to physical space. People should feel present in the mixed reality experiences whilst maintaining their sense of presence through smooth transitions between digital and physical spaces.

The goal of this Research Topic is to present cutting-edge mixed reality evidence, products, and services and discuss the psychology of well-being, social presence, and potential impact on a variety of stakeholders. We will focus on mixed reality as a medium where users, patients, doctors, and/or visitors are developing meaningful relationships while they are transitioning between digital and physical environments. It is a multi-layered medium, people are existing in multiple media spaces simultaneously and move through the media and content. Furthermore, we will highlight recent findings on virtual and physical environmental implications, including telemedicine, anxiety, stress, entertainment, uses of biodata, ethics, and its implication in the novel design and development of products and services. Finally, we aim to discuss the potential for these innovations to inform the design and development of new mixed reality solutions as well as the challenges while designing in this domain. Together, we anticipate that this Research Topic will be broadly informative to clinicians, physician-scientists, designers, product practitioners, and scientists interested in understanding the impact of closely-knit mixed reality experiences that build relationships between people and technology.

This Research Topic welcomes research articles, reviews, and mini-reviews, case reports on the following but not limited to:

• Communication and collaboration in mixed reality, mixed reality for well-being, interactive mixed reality systems, multiuser mixed reality spaces, social mixed reality, human-computer interaction in mixed reality, non-verbal communication in mixed reality, mixed reality systems usability, and user experience studies
• Virtual reality, semi-immersive virtual reality, immersive virtual reality, extended reality
• Telepresence
• Tangible user interfaces
• Spatial augmented reality, see-through augmented reality
• Gesture and/or speech interaction
• Natural/Embodied interaction interfaces
• Avatars for user representation in immersive Mixed Reality spaces
• Embodiment studies
• Cognitive & behavioral studies
• Presence, co-presence, and social presence

Keywords: Anxiety, Stress, Treatment methods, Digital psychiatry, Public mental health

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.