Navigating the Virtuality-Reality Clash: Reflection and Design Patterns for Industrial Mixed Reality Applications

Creating Mixed Reality applications poses distinct challenges for development and design. One of the challenges is designing Mixed Reality application-specific experiences in the wild. In this paper, we present a structured reflection approach to revisit projects from the past. In applying this structured reflection to the data collected during a nine-month industrial project, we unveiled the Virtuality-Reality Clash. To generate a sufficient data corpus, we structurally analysed git commits, tickets, emails, handwritten notes, and weekly snapshots of the 3D designs. The clash could be narrowed down in our data corpus to the situations in which we were fusing the real environment with the virtual content. Finally, we could find five design patterns for MR experience. With these patterns, we aim to help developers and designers of MR applications identify situations where Virtuality and Reality clash and propose approaches to address them.