6. Designing Blended Reality Spaces

This chapter explores how the human-experiential design approach can make it possible to smoothly blend perception and action, and apply it to the nature of designing embodied interaction. The approach attempts to make progress towards an ideal in which our activities are characterized by a natural flow of action, without significant intrusion from technology, across the physical-virtual divide. The resulting tangible sense of presence in blended reality spaces can be applied in a variety of everyday settings. Here we explore some of them, including a home-based system for the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of elderly people. In essence, human-experiential design combines practical aspects, related to human-computer interaction (HCI), with more experiential aspects relating to factors affecting the sense of presence in a location, to capitalize on implicit skills by utilizing real world objects that people are familiar with.