MR2 (MR Square):
A Mixed-Reality Meeting Room
Kiyoshi Kiyokawa*, Makoto Niimi*+, Tsuyoshi Ebina*, Hiroyuki Ohno*
*Communications Research Laboratory (CRL)
4-2-1 Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo, 184-8795, Japan
+
Yokogawa Electric Corporation
2-9-32 Nakacho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo, 180-8750, Japan
kiyo@crl.go.jp, ebi@crl.go.jp, bignum@wide.ad.jp, hohno@ohnolab.org
Abstract
Our new meeting room, the MR Square, was built as a
testing ground of a variety of multimedia user interfaces
and applications. The MR Square features mixed-reality
technologies such as wide-area trackers and tens of
head mount displays, as well as one 200-inch and two
150-inch screens. Participants sit and collaborate in
fully wired, retractable seats. The MR Square illustrates
how state of the art multimedia technologies can be
incorporated into a meeting room.
Figure 1. The MR Square with HMD worn audience.
Keywords: Meeting room design, mixed reality, wide
area tracking, collaboration.
1 Introduction
Despite the rapid progress of computer-related
technologies, quite few meeting rooms are fully
computerized. Researchers are seeking for good
applications of cutting edge technologies, such as mixed
reality (MR), in their laboratory. In many cases, however,
most people are still using poor meeting rooms, where
even outlets for notebooks are difficult to find.
We constructed MR2 (MR Square), a Mixed-Reality
Meeting Room, where a variety of multimedia user
interfaces are integrated. This room primarily has the
following three roles.
1) A model case of multimedia-integrated meeting
room for system designers and researchers.
2) A testing ground of multimedia user interfaces for
application designers and researchers.
3) A hands-on practice place of multimedia user
interfaces for regular workers on daily basis.
In the following, three main components of the MR
Square, MR equipments, an AV booth and retractable
AV seats, are explained in order.
2 MR equipments
The MR Square is equipped with 14 optical seethrough head mount displays (HMDs) connected to the
built-in PCs of the AV seats (Figure 1), and a wide area
Figure 2. Ceiling spread (left), retracted (right).
tracking system. The HMD, Shimadzu’s DataGlass2, is a
light weight (80g) monocular type with the resolution of
SVGA and the horizontal view field of 25 degrees. The
optical tracking system, HiBall-3000 from 3rdTech, was
first developed at UNC [1]. The custom 20ft by 20ft
retractable ceiling moves the tracker’s beacon arrays into
position above the center of the room during use, and
retracts into a storage position at other times (Figure 2).
The tracker’s auto-calibration assures precise tracking
even after these substantial movements.
The head mount displays can be used as just wearable
displays solely or as AR displays when coupled with the
trackers. For example, a presenter may want to use it as a
prompter, while audiences may check emails on their
private displays during a conference. On the other hand,
needless to say, an AR setup is useful to visualize threedimensional data and share them among two or more
people. For instance, global climate observation data,
which CRL has long been studying, have threedimensional structures. Researchers will be able to
collaboratively investigate the data from respective
points of view. A sample application is shown in Figure
3, where two observers are looking at Yakedake
mountains in Japan.
shown on any of the large screens by a touch panel on
the desk (Figure 6). The 200-inch display can be used as
either one 200-inch display or four 100-inch displays (as
shown in Figures 2 and 3). Therefore, up to six different
images can be displayed at a time.
4 AV Seats
Figure 3. A collaborative AR setup (photomontage).
Figure 4. Three large screens.
The MR Square has a seating capacity of 70 (Figure 1).
Different from conventional poorly computerized
meeting rooms, the seats are fully retractable, arranged in
six tiers and all of them are provided with outlets,
Ethernet slots, and RGB and audio inputs for carry-on
notebooks. Two front rows have totally 14 built-in PCs
as well. One notable feature is that each built-in PC has a
HMD as its second display, as explained before. 80
PCMCIA wireless network cards (IEEE802.11b) are
provided for additional network connections. 40 PHSs
(personal handyphone systems) and headsets are
provided for confidential talks among participants.
All of the display signals can be sent to the AV booth
and shown on any of the large screens. This selection is
either made by the touch panel, or by a push button near
each seat. In the former case, up to three display images
of the PCs on the seats can be shown on any of the large
screens. In the latter case, one has only to push one’s
corresponding button to show one’s PCs’ image on the
200-inch screen in “first come, first served” basis. This
feature is remarkably useful when two or more people
have their own materials to share.
5 Conclusions
Figure 5. Operation desk.
Figure 6. Touch panel.
3 AV Booth
Most showy equipment in the MR Square is a 200-inch
display composed of 16 50-inch XGA DLP projectors
(Figure 4). Due to the nature of DLP and total resolution
(4096 by 3072 pixels), this display is capable of showing
high-contrast, high-resolution images. Two 150-inch rear
DLP projectors lie on the left and right of the center
display. These three large screens provide participants
total horizontal viewing angles of about 60 to 100
degrees according to participants’ positions in the room.
The AV booth also has a 5.1ch audio system, providing
three dimensional surround sounds.
An operation desk is provided to control all of the AV
systems (Figure 5). Three PCs, a Macintosh for
presentation, and another PC for digital video server are
arranged on the desk. All PCs’ on the desk and on the
AV seats, ground-based broadcasts received by seven
TV tuners, and auxiliary video inputs can be selected and
Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies
have long been used in laboratories and industries. In
most cases, however, system purposes are specific and
only trained users are targeted. Our newly constructed
MR Square, which is equipped with MR gadgets, is
different from other facilities in terms of multipurpose
and potential number of participants. The MR Square is
basically dedicated to all regular workers of our institute
and used for a variety of purposes, including research
activities, regular meetings, academic workshops and
internal ceremonies, with or without three-dimensional
visualization. This unique characteristic of the MR
Square helps us to investigate how regular affairs can be
supported by MR technologies.
References
[1] Welch, G., Bishop, G., Vicci, L., Brumback, S., Keller, K.
and Colucci, D., “The HiBall Tracker: High-Performance
Wide-Area Tracking for Virtual and Augmented
Environments,” Proc. of the ACM VRST ’99, pp.1-10,
1999.