SecSpace: prototyping usable privacy and security for mixed reality collaborative environments

Abstract

Privacy mechanisms are important in mixed-presence (collocated and remote) collaborative systems. These systems try to achieve a sense of co-presence in order to promote fluid collaboration, yet it can be unclear how actions made in one location are manifested in the other. This ambiguity makes it difficult to share sensitive information with confidence, impacting the fluidity of the shared experience. In this paper, we focus on mixed reality approaches (blending physical and virtual spaces) for mixed presence collaboration. We present SecSpace, our software toolkit for usable privacy and security research in mixed reality collaborative environments. SecSpace permits privacy-related actions in either physical or virtual space to generate effects simultaneously in both spaces. These effects will be the same in terms of their impact on privacy but they may be functionally tailored to suit the requirements of each space. We detail the architecture of SecSpace and present three prototypes that illustrate the flexibility and capabilities of our approach.