Mixed reality in design prototyping: A systematic review

The integration of virtual and physical workflow is a major ongoing trend in engineering, with substantial potential for benefit during design development stages. Within this trend, the emerging field of Mixed Reality technologies provide capability to couple the virtual and physical realms in design prototyping. Applications to date remain ad-hoc however, with little clarity of the breadth of benefits afforded by Mixed Reality. Through a systematic review of 108 publications, this paper presents a classification of the benefits of Mixed Reality technology afforded to prototyping, the design process, and designers. This paper elicits and characterises five evidence-based dimensions of value. These are analysed in detail against design processes and prototyping to extract benefits of application, implementation challenges, and sets directions for future work with implications for design researchers, computer scientists and designers.