A Mixed Reality Application for Collaborative and Interactive Design Review and Usability Studies

In recent days product design and review cycles are considerably held to many constraints and requirements. One of the main requirements re gards the usability of solutions and the impact that design choices have on final users. Therefore, it is becoming crucial to anticipate human factors concerns in the preliminary phases of product development process. Also, since human fac tors affect the users subconsciously and influence the decision making in a sig nificant way, they need to be enabled to observe the users while interacting with the product in real-time. In this framework, the platform that the human factors expert and the users use plays a vital role in influencing the human factor as sessments and evaluations. Latest developments in Extended Reality opened the way toward the possibility to conceive new simulation platforms that allow ex perts to deeply explore the products in real-time through collaborative and in teractive environments before the physical mockup of the product. The purpose of this paper is to outline a Mixed Reality (MR) tool in the field of aircraft inte rior design to demonstrate it as a potential co-creative platform for involving human factor experts in the loop while the task is ongoing. An MR multi-user, co-located, collaborative and interactive environment of an aircraft galley is de veloped where the HF specialist and flight crew member can co-exist to visual ize the real scale model of the galley and perform an operational task. Such co creative tool is foreseen to execute usability tests during design review phase and reduce time, costs of product development cycle while meeting the user re quirements.