Introduction to the Minitrack on Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality
Petri M.T. Parvinen, Juho Hamari, Essi Pöyry · Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2018
Virtual reality (VR) refers to computer technologies that use software to generate the realistic images, sounds and other sensations that represent an immersive environment and simulate a user's physical presence in this environment [10].Mixed reality (MR) refers to combining real and virtual contents with the aid of digital devices [3].Mixed reality is seen to consist of both augmented reality (i.e., virtual 3D objects in immersive reality), and augmented virtuality (i.e., captured features of reality in immersive virtual 3D environments) [7].All these technologies have recently peaked in terms of media attention as they are expected to disturb existing markets like PCs and smartphones did when they were introduced to the markets.The first wave of VR came already in 1990's when a number of industries were inspired by games [1,11,6].However, the user experience was still unpleasant and the hype soon passed.After 2005, a second wave of VR emerged and was more successfully employed in different fields such as engineering, medicine, mental health, design, architecture and construction, education and training, arts, entertainment, business, communication, marketing, military and travel [9,13,6].Now, device, component, software and user-interface development is globally moving fast forward and many world-leading players in manufacturing and ecommerce, for example, are adopting these technologies.Current academic research in the MR sector has concentrated on technology and user-interface research but there is a research gap in studying user experiences and decision-making, technology advancement and application development side-byside in order to understand their value-in-use.The user-value drivers are numerous and should drive application development.So far, the key value drivers have been identified to be cost-saving through out-of-home and out-of-office access, total control and high level of personalization, going beyond reality, personal efficacy experiences, feeling of safety, privacy and confidentiality and immersive experiences [1,2,4,5,8,12].A co-created