Secure and Private Spatial Sharing for Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration in Enterprise Settings

TL;DR

This work addresses the security and privacy risks of multi-user MR spatial sharing in enterprise contexts, where employees and organizations have competing needs. It employs formative employee interviews and expert-domain consultations to build a conceptual framework and a probe-based design that demonstrates a policy-driven, privacy-preserving spatial-sharing pipeline. The authors identify key design requirements and propose actionable recommendations, including context-aware access control, policy communication, and jurisdiction-specific compliance. The study lays groundwork for practical, secure MR deployments in enterprise settings by balancing collaboration benefits with data protection and legal obligations.

Abstract

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are increasingly adopted by enterprises to enhance remote collaboration, enabling users to share real-time views of their physical environments through head-mounted displays (HMDs). While MR spatial sharing offers significant benefits, it introduces complex security and privacy risks, particularly in balancing employee collaboration needs with enterprise data protection requirements across office and personal spaces. This paper investigates these challenges through formative interviews with employees and expert consultations with professionals in cybersecurity, IoT, technology risk, and corporate legal domains. We present a conceptual framework for secure MR spatial sharing in enterprise contexts and identify critical concerns and requirements for system design. Based on our findings, we offer actionable recommendations to guide the development of secure and privacy-preserving MR spatial sharing solutions for future enterprise deployments.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: A demonstration of MR spatial sharing between enterprise and home settings. (a) An employee Bob (blue) who works in an enterprise office shares a physical whiteboard with Carol (red) who is a client at home. Sensitive information such as monitors, documents on the table are opted out from sharing due to company policy. (b) Carol sees the whiteboard and shares his sticky notes with Bob. Private environmental information at his home are opted out from sharing with Bob by Carol.
• Figure 2: A diagram demonstrating the methodology of the paper.
• Figure 3: Our conceptual framework adopts a server-client architecture and the spatial data passes through the major components in the following order: 1) MR background service, 2) cloud localization module, 3) MR client app, 4) cloud sharing policy engine, 5) remote MR client app.
• Figure 4: Visualization of our probe application. (a) shows a visual map of real-time MR device tracking through ultra-wideband (UWB) anchors in a digital twin environment, with distinct zones highlighting area-specific access permissions. (b) shows one of the UWB hardware sensors used for MR device localization.