IMPAct: A Holistic Framework for Mixed Reality Robotic User Interface Classification and Design

The number of scientific publications combining robotic user interfaces and mixed reality highly increased during the 21st Century. Counting the number of yearly added publications containing the keywords “mixed reality” and “robot” listed on Google Scholar indicates exponential growth. The interdisciplinary nature of mixed reality robotic user interfaces (MRRUI) makes them very interesting and powerful, but also very challenging to design and analyze. Many single aspects have already been successfully provided with theoretical structure, but to the best of our knowledge, there is no contribution combining everything into an MRRUI taxonomy. In this article, we present the results of an extensive investigation of relevant aspects from prominent classifications and taxonomies in the scientific literature. During a card sorting experiment with professionals from the field of human–computer interaction, these aspects were clustered into named groups for providing a new structure. Further categorization of these groups into four different categories was obvious and revealed a memorable structure. Thus, this article provides a framework of objective, technical factors, which finds its application in a precise description of MRRUIs. An example shows the effective use of the proposed framework for precise system description, therefore contributing to a better understanding, design, and comparison of MRRUIs in this growing field of research.