Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Break the Window: Exploring Spatial Decomposition of Webpages in XR

Chenyang Zhang, Tianjian Wei, Haoyang Yang, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Yalong Yang, Eric J Gonzalez

TL;DR

This work presents Break-the-Window (BTW), an exploratory prototype that spatially decomposes live, fully functional webpages into movable panels supporting mid-air and surface-attached placement, as well as direct touch and ray-based interaction.

Abstract

Most XR web browsers still present webpages as a single floating window, carrying over desktop design assumptions into immersive space. We explore an alternative by breaking the browser window and distributing a webpage into spatial UI chunks within a mixed-reality workspace. We present Break-the-Window (BTW), an exploratory prototype that spatially decomposes live, fully functional webpages into movable panels supporting mid-air and surface-attached placement, as well as direct touch and ray-based interaction. Through a formative study with XR practitioners and an exploratory qualitative study with 15 participants, we observed how spatial decomposition supports distributed attention and spatial meaning-making, while also surfacing challenges around coordination effort, interaction precision, and the lack of shared spatial UI conventions. This work invites discussion on how web interfaces might be reimagined for spatial computing beyond the single-window paradigm.

Break the Window: Exploring Spatial Decomposition of Webpages in XR

TL;DR

This work presents Break-the-Window (BTW), an exploratory prototype that spatially decomposes live, fully functional webpages into movable panels supporting mid-air and surface-attached placement, as well as direct touch and ray-based interaction.

Abstract

Most XR web browsers still present webpages as a single floating window, carrying over desktop design assumptions into immersive space. We explore an alternative by breaking the browser window and distributing a webpage into spatial UI chunks within a mixed-reality workspace. We present Break-the-Window (BTW), an exploratory prototype that spatially decomposes live, fully functional webpages into movable panels supporting mid-air and surface-attached placement, as well as direct touch and ray-based interaction. Through a formative study with XR practitioners and an exploratory qualitative study with 15 participants, we observed how spatial decomposition supports distributed attention and spatial meaning-making, while also surfacing challenges around coordination effort, interaction precision, and the lack of shared spatial UI conventions. This work invites discussion on how web interfaces might be reimagined for spatial computing beyond the single-window paradigm.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 4 figures)

This paper contains 11 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Formative Study and Design Rationales
  4. Prototype Design: Break-the-Window (BTW)
  5. Spatial Web Decomposition and Embodied Interaction
  6. Spatial Layouts and Representative Webpages
  7. User Study
  8. Key Findings
  9. Discussion: Toward a Spatial UI Grammar for Web Browsing
  10. Conclusion
  11. Project Availability.

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Examples of spatial decomposition and placement annotations from our formative study across nine commonly used websites, spanning diverse browsing purposes such as shopping, navigation, media, and content creation.
  • Figure 2: Overview of BTW's data flow. A live webpage is rendered in a standard browser and streamed into XR as multiple spatial panels, while user interactions in XR are forwarded back to the original webpage in real time.
  • Figure 3: Three representative webpages spatialized with Break-the-Window (BTW).
  • Figure 4: A collection of runtime snapshots from the Break-the-Window (BTW) system.