# Using Mixed Reality (MR) to Improve On-Site Design Experience in Community Planning
## 4 Discussion and Conclusions  
This study aimed to use mixed reality (MR) technology to improve on-site design experiences in community planning. To test its feasibility, we invited sixteen designers to participate in an on-site design experiment using MR for a typical community planning and design scene. The results validate that MR can significantly improve on-site design intuitiveness, accuracy, and convenience in community planning. Specifically, MR can create interactive visualization environments where life-like 3D virtual design objects are displayed in the real world. In MR environments, designers can therefore not only understand the specific community environmental details but also visualize potential design objects and make further design deductions intuitively. MR \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Mean Ranks of Scores for the MR Usage Experience Groups**} & \(p\)**-Value** \\ \hline \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{With MR usage experience} & Without MR usage experience & (ANOVA) \\ \hline On-site design convenience using MR & 11.50 & 7.14 & 0.077 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: The Kruskal–Wallis test for different MR usage experience groups in on-site design convenience using MR.  
Figure 15: The average scores for on-site design convenience using MR in different design experience groups. environments present a wholly real spatial relationship between virtual objects and the real world, which contributes to designers making accurate position perceptions and size judgments when imagining, deducting, and assessing their design proposals. At the same time, the vivid texture rendered by MR could aid designers in finding suitable design materials within the community contexts. With current portable MR-DSS and brief usage instructions, designers can acquire basic design control skills in MR environments. Thus, with MR, they can immerse their design proposals in an actual community scene and make real-time design adjustments conveniently instead of resorting to repeated observation, recording, sketching, and modeling between their studios and the design site. Importantly, it can also be seen from the research results that although almost all the participants admitted that using MR led to improvements in on-site design of community planning, those with rich design experience gave relatively low ratings in the interviews. More specifically, the experienced designers had cultivated mature design habits that relied on their visual imagination through many years of planning and design practice. While they did experience the advantages of MR in this ten-minute on-site design experiment, it was difficult for the experienced designers to change long-standing design habits in such a short time. They preferred conventional on-site design methods that might be more tedious and complicated to the unfamiliar new technology. In their opinion, MR might serve as an auxiliary to current on-site design of community planning when necessary. However, there are still some limitations to our study. First, regarding the hardware, we selected Microsoft HoloLens, which was the most advanced MR head-mount display at the time. Its technical characteristics (3D holographic visualization, natural control mode, accurate spatial mapping, and real depth perception) fit our study purposes well. Its weight (579 g), however, makes it unsuitable for wearing over long periods, and its low battery life (less than three hours) makes it less suitable for supporting sustainable outdoor design work. Additionally, the narrow FOV of the Microsoft HoloLens cannot present the whole MR environment, which can affect environmental perception and design judgment to some extent. Second, with regard to the software, because there were no suitable apps in the official Microsoft Store, we developed the application software, HoloDesigner, in-house. As we are not professional programmers, the current appearance, fluency, and stability of HoloDesigner need to be optimized further.