What is it about?

Have you ever wanted to ask a friend whether a new sofa would fit in your living room, get a designer's opinion on your layout, or work through a project with a colleague as if you were both standing in the same space? With CIDER, you can do all of that remotely. We introduce Collaborative Interactive Dynamic Environments for eXtended Reality (CIDER), the first eXtended Reality (XR) platform that seamlessly connects Mixed Reality (MR) for co-located users and Virtual Reality (VR) for remote participants within a single shared virtual space. Using a mixed reality headset (Microsoft HoloLens 2), CIDER's fully automated pipeline scans your physical room, identifies the furniture within it, and recreates that space as an interactive 3D virtual environment within seconds. A remote participant, whether a designer, a collaborator, or a friend, can then step into that virtual version of your room from anywhere in the world using a VR headset or even a regular computer. They can walk around freely, rearrange virtual furniture to try out different layouts, place new pieces to see how they fit, and discuss everything in real time as if they were physically present. Think of it as taking your room and sharing it the way you would share a document, except instead of reading it on a screen, the other person can walk around inside it.

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Why is it important?

Most existing remote collaboration systems require expensive, specialized hardware, produce data-heavy outputs that introduce frustrating delays, or confine users to pre-built virtual environments that bear no resemblance to the real world. CIDER addresses all of these shortcomings at once. It is the first XR authoring framework to enable on-demand creation of interactive, collaborative virtual environments that dynamically mirror real-world scenes in a synchronized manner, taking just a few seconds from scan to shared space. What sets CIDER apart is its use of a lightweight representation of the physical environment through a robust 3D reconstruction system, which enables efficient scene sharing and keeps interaction latency to just 0.22 seconds, more than ten times faster than the closest comparable AR collaboration system. Crucially, the system is designed to run on hardware with limited computational resources, making it practical beyond high-end research labs. It requires no technical expertise to set up or operate, which means educators, real estate professionals, designers, and remote teams can benefit from it without needing a dedicated technical team. At a time when remote work, distance education, telemedicine, and global collaboration are central to how people live and work, CIDER offers a rare combination: immersive, real-world-grounded collaboration that is genuinely accessible to everyday users.

Perspectives

Hung-Jui Guo: What excites me most about this work is how it brings together several hard problems, including real-time 3D reconstruction, cross-device networking, and human-centered design, into a system that a non-expert can actually use. The COVID-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear how critical accessible remote collaboration tools are, and even in the current post-pandemic era, the need for people to work meaningfully across distances has not diminished. If anything, it has become a permanent fixture of how we live and work. Hiranya Kumar: What has always troubled me about existing remote collaboration systems is that the people who need them most are often the least able to use them. Most solutions are built around high-cost devices or require a level of technical know-how that excludes everyday users. With CIDER, we set out to change that. When we first demonstrated the system to participants who had never used a VR headset before, watching them naturally reach out and rearrange virtual furniture as if it were real was genuinely rewarding. It reinforced my belief that the goal of immersive technology is not the technology itself, but the feeling of genuine presence and connection it enables. I think CIDER can benefit the broader community in a meaningful way, by offering a user-friendly, low-latency collaboration system that does not demand expensive hardware or specialist expertise. That, to me, is where its real value lies.

Hung-Jui Guo
National Cheng Kung University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: CIDER: Collaborative Interactive Dynamic Environments for eXtended Reality, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, April 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3796237.
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