Opportunities and Challenges of Hybrid User Interfaces for Optimization of Mixed Reality Interfaces.

Current research highlights the importance of adaptive mixed reality interfaces, as increased adoption leads to increasingly diverse, complex and unconstrained interaction scenarios. An interesting approach for adaptation, is the optimization of interface layout and behaviour. We thereby consider three distinct types of context to which the interface adapts: the user, the activity, and the environment. The latter of these includes a myriad of interactive devices surrounding the user, the capabilities of which we propose to take advantage of by integrating them in a hybrid user interface. Hybrid user interfaces offer many opportunities to address distinct usability issues, such as visibility, reachability, and ergonomics. However, considering additional interactive devices for optimizing mixed reality interfaces introduces a number of additional challenges, such as detecting available and suitable devices and modeling the respective interaction costs. Moreover, using different devices potentially introduces a switching cost e.g., in terms of cognitive load and time. In this paper, we aim to discuss different opportunities and challenges of using hybrid user interfaces for the optimization of mixed reality interfaces and thereby highlight directions for future work.