Tangible mixed reality for remote design review: a study understanding user perception and acceptance

Abstract

Background: The design review process is often expensive due to the need for face-to-face meetings between the involved parties. Distributed design collaboration is made possible by advances in networking techniques. A tangible Mixed Reality (MR)-based virtual design prototype was created as a distributed virtual environment (DVE) for the purpose of improving remote design review collaboration. This tangible MR system has been developed to a point that experimental evaluation is necessary in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various features of the system. Methods: In this paper, we evaluated the tangible MR system against a commercial 3D distributed design review system in three aspects: the investigation of how users experienced virtual models in the tangible MR system as compared with the commercial system, the measurement of the users’ attitude towards the effectiveness of the tangible MR system, and the discoveries of usability issues involved in the tangible MR interface through usability studies. Results: The findings from user feedback suggest that the tangible MR system may facilitate problem-solving and the quantity of work in a given amount of time and that virtual design displayed in the mixed scene was a useful aid in the design error detection task. Conclusion: These findings are useful for the improvement of future generations of the MR system. Also the suggestions can be further generalized to become usability guidelines for the MR developers in other applications and domains.