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.

A Review on Mixed Reality: Current Trends, Challenges and Prospects

“…[69] describes the characteristics of MR systems as follows: (1) real and digital content is integrated into an application; (2) an MR application is interactive in real-time; and (3) an MR application is registered in three dimensions. Regarding these three features, various types of MR systems have been presented in various studies such as, multimodal MR [70], visuohaptic MR [71], tangible MR [72], context-aware real-time MR [37], markerless MR [43], adaptive MR [55], and multiscale MR [73]. This framework provides many benefits for users.…”

“…This improves the visibility of the model. Such a framework needs to handle the problem of delay due to a lack of synchronization when the model is observed [72].…”

Participated Planning of Large Water Infrastructures through Virtual Prototyping Technologies

“…However, again, this application is not conceived to work remotely (participants need to wear head-mounted displays and sit at the same table) and the focus is more on visualisation rather than on providing an advanced contents communication and manipulation. The application described in [22] allows remote collaborations, but the focus is still on providing advanced contents visualisation. Actually, this work demonstrates that AR-based collaborative applications have the potential of facilitating the decision-making process if compared with standard collaborative design platforms.…”

“…Moreover, multiple devices are supported, so the system can be used indifferently with a desktop computer or a mobile phone (further aspects will be discussed in Section 4). There are only a few examples of collaborative applications allowing AR visualisation, (e.g., see [20][21][22]) since mainly virtual environments have been used as communication platforms (e.g., see [23,24]). …”

Editorial visualization in engineering

“…The accessibility of construction equipment have been examined by (Yang et al 2013) using a virtual reality (VR) platform. Tangible mixed reality applications have been used in a remote design view scenario (Wang & Dunston 2013). Besides the development of visualization applications, emerging modeling technologies like Building Information Modeling (BIM) have also been presented by integrating visualization tools for multi-disciplinary design of construction (Kovacic et al 2013).…”