Social Cooperation and Competition in the Mixed Reality Space eXperience Introduction Machine

Although the architecture of mixed reality spaces are becoming increasingly more complex, our understanding of human behavior in such spaces is still limited. Despite the sophisticated models deployed in psychology and behavioral biology to track and analyze the actions and movements of animals, we rarely find studies that focus on the understanding of human social behavior using such instruments. Here we address this issue by analyzing social behavior and physical actions of multiple human subjects in a mixed reality space. As a paradigm of social interaction we constructed a mixed reality football game in which two teams of two players have to cooperate and compete in order to win. This paradigm was deployed in the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), a human accessible fully instrumented space that supports full body interaction in mixed reality without the need for body-mounted sensors. Our results show that winning and losing strategies can be discerned in specific behavioral patterns. This demonstrates that mixed reality systems such as XIM provide new paradigms for the investigation of human social behavior. Keywords--Social Behavior, Cooperation, Competition, Interaction, Mixed Reality, XIM, Game Play