Exploring the Use of Mixed-Reality for the Design and Innovation of Future Ubiquitous Devices and Intelligent Environments

The ever evolving range of user centric technology promises new and exciting applications which will permeate society and change the very nature of our social interaction. The increasing demand of collating our physical and digital lives is putting pressure on companies to come up with innovative products. Companies have to plan far ahead into the future, despite lacking the technological infrastructure. In this paper we describe the goal of a research project that, together with Intel, is investigating tools and methodologies which would allow companies to plan into the future by building online virtual prototypes. Real users, from different domains, would use these virtual prototypes to test different aspects and attributes of these potential products to provide relevant user-experience feedback. The feedback would be recorded in an automated and intelligent manner to improve the design. Developing prototypes in such mixed reality environments would enable the involvement of end users from early on. We believe such an approach would allow for better design innovation by providing mechanisms for collaborative research and development across distributed geographical locations. This short work-in-progress-paper will describe the concepts underpinning this research direction.