Focus-based design of mixed reality systems

Abstract

Currently very few techniques are available to support the design of Augmented and Mixed Reality (MR) systems. Task elicitation is more complex for MR systems than for traditional information systems. Having multiple sources of information and two worlds of interaction (real and virtual) involves making choices about what to attend to and when. Interaction based on traditional input and output devices is not effective in a mixed scenario. It distracts the user from the task at hand and may create a severe cognitive seam. Understanding, formalizing and modeling such aspects can help designers to assess interaction at all the stages of development. We are interested in focused applications that require the user's hand free for real world tasks and to understand how the user's task focus drives designing MR systems. The contribution of this paper is twofold: it first illustrates the specific requirements posed by such systems and then it shows through a study case that there is currently no complete support to model these aspects among the tools commonly employed for task modeling.