Mixed reality commercial design : designing the space and interface between digital and physical environments of purchase

Jin, Lingyao and Fagan, Des and Karnik, Abe and Conroy-Dalton, Ruth (2025) Mixed reality commercial design : designing the space and interface between digital and physical environments of purchase. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (2025LingyaoJinPhD)
2025LingyaoJinPhD.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (36MB)

Abstract

With omnichannel retail and increasingly competitive markets, technology and digital marketing are penetrating the market to improve retailer profitability and brand image. To enhance the attractiveness of brick-and-mortar stores, retailers and brands are increasingly adopting mass customisation and immersive technologies to create unique experiences, such as Mixed Reality (MR) technology. However, MR retail is an emerging field, and the lack of empirical, theoretical, and practical guidance for its design and strategies for customer experience, store environment, and user interface leads to low market adoption and has yet to be successful in commercialisation. In response to this phenomenon, this thesis explores the requirements and challenges of the market to guide the MR retail commercial design to provide value for stakeholders. The research indicates that the current retail market remains unprepared for MR implementation. These challenges relate to multiple issues, such as customer experience quality, market environment accessibility barriers, unavailability of open-source applications, equipment barriers, ethics and policies. However, the findings also revealed that implementing MR with brick-and-mortar stores can address customer experience challenges and obstacles observed in online or offline shopping channels. In order to create a seamless MR customer experience, this thesis proposes an MR commercial design framework – “DIDPOE”: define, ideate, design, prototype, onboarding, and evaluate. It suggests that MR-based retail should enhance the practical functionality of the commercial application with ergonomic MR user interfaces, design an MR store environment, and refine MR retail assistant services to improve customer experience inclusiveness in stores. An MR Product Configurator (MRPC) prototype system and MR user interface design principles were developed to fulfil the demands of mass customisation, combined with an MR store interior environment design guideline for adopting the MRPC in commercial space. Through designing a holistic experience, consumers can obtain an efficient and enjoyable shopping experience from MR that other retail channels cannot deliver. This helps retailers promise MR retail long-term success and future MR mass retail implementation.