Design Strategies to Enhance Awareness in MR Collaborative Systems

An increasing number of innovative technologies are fostering augmented collaborative systems, thus setting the milestones of future collaboration paradigms. By merging real and virtual elements, mixed reality technologies lead to an augmented perception of the working environment and, consequently, an enriched experience of collaborative task execution. However, at the same time, such technologies can also impede proper communication and understanding among the entities working in concert to reach a common goal. Wearing head-mounted displays and simultaneously managing two different interactions - human-human and human-machine can lead to misunderstandings with co-workers. This also can hinder awareness, a fundamental requirement for the effective execution of collaborative tasks. As a consequence, cognitive load can increase with a negative impact on task performance. This paper analyses the main elements of a collaborative practice. Specifically, our aim is to identify crucial factors that must be considered for designing an effective interface for a collaborative mixed reality system. Then, we discuss some solutions to ensure that technology can act as an aid, rather than an impediment, to the accomplishment of collaborative tasks.