Break the Window: Exploring Spatial Decomposition of Webpages in XR

TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel approach to XR web browsing by spatially decomposing webpages into movable panels within a mixed-reality workspace, challenging traditional single-window interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces Break-the-Window (BTW), a prototype enabling spatial decomposition of webpages with interactive panels, and provides insights from user studies on its usability and challenges.

Findings

Supports distributed attention and spatial meaning-making.

Highlights coordination effort and interaction precision challenges.

Reveals lack of shared spatial UI conventions.

Abstract

Most XR web browsers still present webpages as a single floating window, carrying over desktop design assumptions into immersive space. We explore an alternative by breaking the browser window and distributing a webpage into spatial UI chunks within a mixed-reality workspace. We present Break-the-Window (BTW), an exploratory prototype that spatially decomposes live, fully functional webpages into movable panels supporting mid-air and surface-attached placement, as well as direct touch and ray-based interaction. Through a formative study with XR practitioners and an exploratory qualitative study with 15 participants, we observed how spatial decomposition supports distributed attention and spatial meaning-making, while also surfacing challenges around coordination effort, interaction precision, and the lack of shared spatial UI conventions. This work invites discussion on how web interfaces might be reimagined for spatial computing beyond the single-window paradigm.