Comparative Effectiveness of Mixed Reality Based Virtual Environments in Collaborative Design

This paper presents two Mixed Reality (MR) environments that provide alternative mediums that allow groups of people to share the same work and communications space in face-to-face and remote manners. Two experiments were executed to test the capabilities of the two MR systems in realistic environment and collaborative tasks against prevalent methods. Results indicated that the two MR systems significantly reduced the performance time for the collaborative design error detection task. Results also indicated less mental effort for the MR systems, suggesting that some of the mental interpretation for the error detection task is offloaded to the MR systems.