Working in Extended Reality in the Wild: Worker and Bystander Experiences of XR Virtual Displays in Real-World Settings

TL;DR

This work investigates the viability of XR virtual displays to augment knowledge-work screen space in public settings through two in-the-wild studies. The first study explores a hybrid AR canvas around a laptop across diverse campus environments to reveal usage patterns and social/environmental factors; the second study compares a laptop, AR, and VR setups in a cafeteria, including bystander perspectives, using standardized cognitive and usability measures. Across both studies, XR displays were generally well-accepted and capable of expanding window capacity, though hardware limitations and social factors (e.g., how users are perceived) influence adoption and sustained use. The findings highlight design implications such as unconstrained window placement, rapid window switching, and environment-aware interactions, and point to the need for improved display fidelity, lighter form factors, and clearer bystander education to accelerate XR’s practical adoption in real-world knowledge-work contexts.

Abstract

Although access to sufficient screen space is crucial to knowledge work, workers often find themselves with limited access to display infrastructure in remote or public settings. While virtual displays can be used to extend the available screen space through extended reality (XR) head-worn displays (HWD), we must better understand the implications of working with them in public settings from both users' and bystanders' viewpoints. To this end, we conducted two user studies. We first explored the usage of a hybrid AR display across real-world settings and tasks. We focused on how users take advantage of virtual displays and what social and environmental factors impact their usage of the system. A second study investigated the differences between working with a laptop, an AR system, or a VR system in public. We focused on a single location and participants performed a predefined task to enable direct comparisons between the conditions while also gathering data from bystanders. The combined results suggest a positive acceptance of XR technology in public settings and show that virtual displays can be used to accompany existing devices. We highlighted some environmental and social factors. We saw that previous XR experience and personality can influence how people perceive the use of XR in public. In addition, we confirmed that using XR in public still makes users stand out and that bystanders are curious about the devices, yet have no clear understanding of how they can be used.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: User working at a cafe in study 1: hybrid canvas display expands a laptop monitor with virtual space around it.
• Figure 2: Study 1 was conducted across four campus settings: (a) Library, (b) Cafe, (c) Outdoors, and (d) Dining Hall.
• Figure 3: Questionnaire results of study 1. Higher agreement means positive results. Some of the statements were worded such that higher agreement would be negative, but we reversed the scale for those statements and added DID/DO NOT (capitalized) to them to achieve a unified scale.
• Figure 4: Participant's views during the task for the laptop condition (a), AR condition (b) and VR condition (c).
• Figure 5: Violin plots for measures of study 2 where significant differences were found. Red dots indicate the arithmetic mean and stars indicate the level of significance in post-hoc tests: $*<0.05$, $**<0.01$, $***<0.001$.