Integrating human-computer interaction and business practices for mixed reality systems design: a case study

The software engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI) communities do not use the same methods, models and languages. This problem is more significant when they intend to work together to develop interactive applications, especially mixed reality systems; merging real and virtual worlds. In this context, it is necessary to develop a method for integrating software engineering and HCI practices and allowing an efficient collaboration between experts from different cultures of development. Essential principles and approaches are presented here to design mixed reality systems. The interaction specifications are integrated along the business process evolution to take into account the mixed reality interactions. Models and approaches are developed to highlight the relationships between business and interaction spaces. The proposed method is detailed and applied on a case study. The method is evaluated in a quantitative study using questionnaires involving designers, programmers and users. The evaluation, essentially, concerns the ease of use of the method and its effectiveness. It is concluded that the proposed method enables specialists from both domains to collaborate and synchronise their activities for integrating mixed reality features in the information systems design. Some improvements envisaged for the proposed work are presented.