# Augmenting Industrial Control Rooms with Multimodal Collaborative Interaction Techniques
## 5 Conclusions  
We propose to augment an industrial control room with multimodal collaborative interaction techniques. Based on previous work on the _digital boardroom_ and _digital control room_ we have presented our _augmented digital control room_. While previous work focuses on annotation dashboards for supporting collaboration and includes first results on integrating body gesture and speech-based interaction, our augmented digital control room includes mobile workers who use the control room while being in the production hall. This is mainly based on using MR glasses, i.e., the Microsoft Hololens 2 in our studies. The main findings of our evaluations are summarized in Table 1.  
While the Microsoft Hololens 2 is currently one of the best and most relevant MR devices for modern MR applications, it still suffers usability issues such as a small viewport and imperfect gesture recognition. In this study we mostly worked with people that are not trained on such devices. This combination led to the effect that sometimes the concepts that we tried to test with our prototypes were overshadowed by, e.g., gesture recognition issues. Interestingly, it was not the same issue for every participant. Some had issues with the bending of the hand for the dice menu, some had temporary issues with far interaction, while others tended to lose orientation and accidentally opened other apps and windows on the device. Additionally, creating optimal lighting in a room was not always possible and participants suffered fatigue. The number of study participants was reduced by people that told us about their unwillingness to use the MR glasses due to fear of motion sickness. This assumption shows a general misleading view that virtual reality, which is strongly connected to motion sickness, and MR were the same. Studies show that motion sickness is not a relevant issue for MR applications where the real world is still visible (cf. [34]). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{142.3 pt} p{284.5 pt}} \hline \hline RQ 1 & - Measureable perfomance of the participants was on average similiar on both platforms, but from their perspective MR was more comfortable - Color shades on the HoloLens are difficult to distinguish, especially in bright light conditions \\ \hline RQ 2 & - 3D-objects can improve the interface design, but new gestures need to be developed - Perception of what is a good interface is individual, therefore multimodal interaction techniques are crucial \\ \hline RQ 3 & - Having the mouse cursor visualized on the HoloLens improved the satisfaction level for the collaboration - The usefulness of hand and gaze visualization was limited due to the kind of application used \\ \hline RQ 4 & - A significant amount of participants believe that the 3D object serves as a more user friendly alternative - More reliable feedback is dependant on a more developed prototype \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Overview of the main findings of our studies. We already have promising results using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 device. However, further development of MR devices is a relevant factor for future research. In our future research, we will focus on extending and improving the MR-based collaboration features, e.g., for collaborative data exploration. More specifically, it is interesting to investigate into collaborative scenarios in this context, where MR users can interact with objects by themselves compared to a situation where only a desktop user can do interactions and the MR user adds to the task by voice and gestures. We further developed the scatterplot application for a more interactive experience, where users can manipulate the data through zooming or changing dimensions [35]. We plan to evaluate applications such as this in the future because we think that the advantages of the immersive experience will become clearer. In addition, we would like to investigate further the usage of 3D holographic objects for supporting the digital workspace.