Step by step: Evaluating navigation styles in mixed reality entertainment experience

Abstract

The availability of depth sensing technology in smartphones and tablets adds spatial awareness as an interaction modality to mobile entertainment experiences and showcases the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) for creating immersive and engaging experiences in real world contexts. However, the lack of design knowledge about interactions within MR represents a barrier to creating effective entertainment experiences. Faced with this challenge, we contribute a study of three navigation styles (NS) for MR experiences shown on a handheld device. The navigation styles range from fully virtual, through a mixed style that involves both on-screen and in-world activity, to fully real navigation. Our findings suggest that when designing an MR experience, the navigation style deployed should reflect the context, content and required interactions. For our MR experience, “The Old Pharmacy”, with its specific content, context and required interactions, results show that navigation styles relying on in-world activity leads to higher levels of Presence, Immersion and Flow.