Operating heavy vehicles, for instance an excavator, requires a high level of attention to the operation done using the vehicle and awareness of the surroundings. Digital transformation in heavy vehicles aims to improve productivity and user experience, but it can also increase the operators mental load because of a higher demand of attention to instrumentation and controls, subsequently leading to reduced situation awareness. One way to mitigate this, is to display information within the operators' field of view, which enhances information detectability through quick glances, using mixed reality interfaces. This work explores two types of mixed reality visualizations and compares them to a traditional display setup in a simulated excavator environment. We have utilized eye-tracking glasses to study users' attention to the task, surrounding awareness, and interfaces, followed by a NASA-RTLX questionnaire to evaluate the users' reported mental workload. The results indicate benefits for the mixed reality approaches, with lower workload ratings together with an improved rate in detection of presented information.

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This study investigates how Human Factors (HF) is applied when designing and developing Immersive Visual Technologies (IVT), including Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and Virtual Reality. We interviewed fourteen people working at different organizations, that develop IVT applications in the Nordic region. We used thematic analysis to derive themes from the interviews. The results showed an insufficient knowledge and application of HF in IVT development, due to the lack of awareness of both scope and significance of HF, resource allocation strategy, market inertia, stakeholder's involvement, standardization of HF application and IVT uses, and technology maturity. This situation could be improved by allocating experts, adjusting organizational strategy to balance resource allocation, training developers and user organizations to raise awareness and to encourage co-creative design and knowledge sharing, create a sense of ownership amongst stakeholders, and ensure the usefulness of the technology to the user's work.

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