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This paper proposes the concept of Co-Habited Mixed Reality, and argues how it serves as a basis for large-scale social interaction systems and communityware. The technology that it implies is aimed at focusing a large potential for interaction such that eeectiveness of participation to large scale events is enhanced. We illustrate the idea with scenarios from an ongoing project (COMRIS: co-habited mixed reality information spaces), implementing the co-habited mixed reality for a large conference site or fare. Several of the key issues involved in this realization are brieey summarized. Work from other projects that demonstrates the feasibility is also described. In this paper we are concerned with concepts and technologies that can enhance a variety of social processes in large and informally structured groups. The applications that we have in mind involve large information intensive events in which the possibilities for interactions among participants are many, but not every encounter leads to a productive social process. For example, at a major fair there may be many potential buyers and sellers, but only some will come to a productive interaction, i.c. a business deal. Or, at a conference center like the Nagoya IJCAI-97 site, the scale and great diversity of topics and purposes that are being addressed make it diicult to get everything done, i.e., each of one's interests satissed. Our results must help to focus a large potential for interaction such that eeectiveness of participation to such large events is enhanced. To this end, the idea of co-habited mixed reality brings together three visions that are driving much work on collaborative systems. We share with many the vision of shared virtual spaces (e.g. Fahlen, 1993]), projecting that the future open and wide-area networks will have the characteristics of large structures of interconnected places, in which participants can navigate, act and interact. Within such places, information provides a (shared) context for the diierent participants to access and change. The structure and organization of a place enables (and possibly regulates) those interactions that serve the place's purpose, like entertainment , commerce, learning, and so on. We are confronting this vision with a second one: the agent-based approach (e.g. Genesereth and Ketchpel, 1994]). Here one imagines the future information systems as a huge collection of software agents, each of them ooering or autonomously pursuing a service on behalf of users or other agents. A third trend that is basic to our view is …