Abstract
These days technology enables people to collaborate on work, despite being separated by large physical distances. A variety of such systems have been developed to support organisations such as universities or companies. Most of these platforms are focused on conveying information rather than dealing with collaboration around physical activities that are common in product development or university laboratory activities, where, if such work exists, tend to be confined to the use of simulations. In this paper we introduce a system and associated set of techniques that enables teams of physically dispersed workers to collaborate on the construction of products that comprise both physical (hardware) and information (software) based objects in a so-called mixed-reality environment. The work aims to support dispersed development teams such as students, company R&D members or hobbyist (e.g. enabling the creation of virtual hackerspaces). As such the work focuses around the use of Internet-of-Things technologies to enable people to collectively build new products. In this work-in-progress paper we describe the implementation of xReality objects and their communication within an interreality system, extending our previous work towards the creation of a holistic option for enable geographically dispersed teams to collaborate on the construction of mixed hardware and software products.