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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

MoveTogether: Exploring Physical Co-op Gameplay in Mixed-Reality

Pin Chun Lu , Wen-Fan Wang , Che Wei Wang , Ting-Ying Lee , TsaiHsuan Lin , DuoJie Hsiao , CheHan Hsieh , YuTing Tseng , Neng-Hao Yu , Mike Y. Chen

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This is a credible CHI contribution because it combines a concrete interaction technique with design-space exploration and a controlled comparison. The strongest value is conceptual: it reframes co-located co-op around a shared physical channel, then shows that this can alter coordination and communication in a small but meaningful study.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

MoveTogether reads as a solid CHI honorable-mention style paper because it does more than present a playful prototype: it identifies a gap in how co-located co-op is usually designed, proposes a specific interaction technique that makes the prop itself the shared communication medium, and then backs that idea with both designer input and a within-subjects comparison. The novelty is not a deep technical breakthrough in sensing or MR infrastructure; rather, it is a design and interaction contribution that is easy to understand and plausibly useful for future co-located play systems. The abstract’s framing is important because it argues that physical proximity alone does not guarantee embodied coordination, which is a useful corrective to a common assumption in the field. The validation is appropriately scoped for the claim: 10 professional designers help articulate a design space, and 16 participants in a within-subjects study provide evidence that the physical co-op version changes coordination, collisions, and communication style. That said, the paper’s own limitations matter. The results are tied to a specific ring-based prototype, a two-player setup, and a visually co-located MR context, so the work should be read as establishing a promising design family rather than a universal principle. The strongest claim is therefore generative: it offers a new way to think about embodied co-op and a concrete starting point for future systems, not a final answer about all mixed-reality collaboration. Overall, the evidence and claims are well aligned, with moderate overclaim risk only because the mechanism is not fully isolated and the study scope is necessarily narrow.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior CHI work on co-located play and mixed reality often treats collaboration as mediated through separate controllers, avatars, or virtual coordination channels rather than a single shared physical object. This paper positions itself against that baseline by making the prop itself the communication medium.

Departure from common sense

The paper challenges the intuitive assumption that simply placing players in the same room is enough to produce embodied collaboration. Instead, it argues that co-located co-op can still remain effectively virtual unless the interaction design creates a shared physical channel that changes how partners coordinate.

Actual novelty

MoveTogether’s novelty is the physical co-op mechanic in which two players jointly operate one tracked prop, so the prop becomes a shared communication channel layered over visual and audio cues. The paper also extends this into a design space through a designer workshop and a comparative study.

Evidence

The paper supports a new interaction technique and a design-space contribution. It explicitly introduces a jointly manipulated tracked prop as a shared physical communication channel, reports a workshop with 10 professional designers that generated prop and interaction design dimensions, and presents a within-subjects study with 16 participants showing differences in coordination, communication, collisions, and preference between physical and virtual co-op.

Limits

Method limits

The validation is a mixed-methods package rather than a broad benchmark: a workshop with 10 professional designers and a within-subjects study with 16 participants. The evidence is strongest for the specific prototype and the reported comparison, but it does not establish general effects across many game genres, prop forms, or player populations.

Deployment limits

The approach depends on a tracked shared prop and mixed-reality setup, so deployment requires hardware, tracking reliability, and careful physical-space design. The paper’s findings are tied to the specific ring-based prototype and may not transfer directly to other co-op tasks or to settings where shared physical manipulation is impractical.

Boundary conditions

The paper’s own framing and limitations indicate that the results are bounded by two-player pre-existing pairs, one prop design, and a visually co-located MR game context. The findings reflect combined physical and virtual elements rather than isolating each contribution, so the mechanism should be read as a design direction rather than a decomposed causal claim.

Manual check: Check the exact section offsets and quoted spans against the source text if publication requires fully audited character ranges.

Position in field

This sits at the intersection of mixed reality, co-located play, and embodied collaboration. Its main contribution is not a new rendering or sensing pipeline, but a gameplay interaction pattern and a design-space articulation for physical co-op in MR, with empirical evidence that the pattern changes coordination and communication.

Abstract

Current co-op games keep collaboration virtual even when players are physically co-located in the same room, limiting embodied coordination in the shared space. We introduce MoveTogether, a novel physical co-op gameplay in which two players jointly operate a single, tracked prop, adding a shared physical communication channel on top of visual and audio cues. To explore the design space in mixed reality, we conducted a workshop with 10 professional designers, generating a physical co-op design space that encompasses prop and interaction design patterns, and how they relate to affordance and cooperative experience. In a within-subjects study of virtual vs. physical co-op experiences (n=16), we observed finer-grained task coordination, fewer collisions, and more strategy-focused communication. Players reported higher collaboration, sense of achievement, enjoyment, and overall preference for physical co-op. This work opens a new design space for co-located play and offers guidance for designing embodied co-op experiences.