MaRginalia: Enabling In-person Lecture Capturing and Note-taking Through Mixed Reality

Students often take digital notes during live lectures, but current methods can be slow when capturing information from lecture slides or the instructor's speech, and require them to focus on their devices, leading to distractions and missing important details. This paper explores supporting live lecture note-taking with mixed reality (MR) to quickly capture lecture information and take notes while staying engaged with the lecture. A survey and interviews with university students revealed common note-taking behaviors and challenges to inform the design. We present MaRginalia to provide digital note-taking with a stylus tablet and MR headset. Students can take notes with an MR representation of the tablet, lecture slides, and audio transcript without looking down at their device. When preferred, students can also perform detailed interactions by looking at the physical tablet. We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of MaRginalia and MR-based note-taking in a user study with 12 students.
Comment: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25)