In open-plan offices, visual noise from surrounding people and objects can negatively impact both concentration and mood. Mixed Reality (MR) offers a promising approach to address this challenge by reshaping the workspace. In this paper, we first conducted a survey with 50 office workers to examine the impact of visual noise, identifying common sources of distraction and potential mitigation strategies. Considering the necessity of face-to-face communication in office environments, we designed adaptive user interfaces to strike a balance between deep focus and seamless in-situ collaboration. We utilized Virtual Reality (VR) and Diminished Reality (DR) methods to eliminate visual noise and leveraged face orientation along with a distance threshold to determine collaborative intentions. We developed a prototype system and conducted a user study for evaluation. The results indicate that our system can create a tranquil workspace to foster concentration and workplace well-being, while maintaining necessary in-situ collaboration. These findings provide valuable insights for designing future MR-integrated office environments.

Tangible Augmented Reality (AR) enhances user immersion in virtual world by providing haptic feedback through physical proxy objects. However, existing approaches primarily focus on selecting proxy objects based on their global physical properties, neglecting the utilization of local features. Besides, the prevailing strategy of mapping one virtual object to a single dedicated physical proxy creates an inherent switching cost, limiting flexibility and efficiency. Additionally, due to challenges such as real-time performance, generalization and occlusion, the vision-based hand-object tracking remains a difficult task. In this paper, we propose Ubi Grip, an universal hand-object interaction framework for creating grip-based tangible AR applications based on the local graspable feature and a comprehensive hand-object interaction attributes methodology. We employ a lightweight object tracking method to perform tracking, utilizing a hand mask filter and transformation strategy to optimize object pose based on the hand-held properties. Moreover, we design a user-defined workflow for grasping tangible objects, allowing users to switch grips and map interactions. We evaluated our system through comprehensive algorithmic benchmarks and a user study. The benchmarks demonstrate our SOTA performance in object pose estimation and generalization, while the user study validates system usability, providing deeper insights.