Prototyping Cross-Reality Escape Rooms

With more and more applications exploring the possibilities of AR and VR, some applications do not stay inside one reality but operate cross-reality. We propose the concept of a cross-reality escape room, where one player is in the real world interacting with real objects and one player is in a virtual world. They have to work together to solve a series of puzzles to complete the game. The actions one player does on their side can directly affect the other player’s world. Besides the concept of cross-reality escape rooms, we also provide an end-user editor to create such games. The editor aims to enable non-technical users, like designers for conventional escape rooms, to create their own cross-reality escape room, including creating and positioning objects and integrating and configuring a logic flow that drives the application. This allows virtual objects to be configured as well as real-life objects. To evaluate the concept and editor, twelve participants in groups of two first played a demo escape room and used the editor to create part of a room themselves. They were asked to give quantitative and qualitative feedback for both parts. With a score of 55.17 out of possible 63 on the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale (GUESS)-18, we can say, that players like the demo room, we created. Combined with results from open feedback sessions, the players liked the concept, and that cross-reality adds value to the concept of escape rooms. However, there is still potential to improve. For the editor, we received mixed results, that depend heavily on the individual users. During semi-structured interviews, we could also create a list of improvements for future versions.