Visualizing Causality in Mixed Reality for Manual Task Learning: A Study

Mixed Reality (MR) is gaining prominence in manual task skill learning due to its in-situ, embodied, and immersive experience. To teach manual tasks, current methodologies break the task into hierarchies (tasks into subtasks) and visualize not only the current subtasks but also the future ones that are causally related. We investigate the impact of visualizing causality within an MR framework on manual task skill learning. We conducted a user study with 48 participants, experimenting with how presenting tasks in hierarchical causality levels (no causality, event-level, interaction-level, and gesture-level causality) affects user comprehension and performance in a complex assembly task. The research finds that displaying all causality levels enhances user understanding and task execution, with a compromise of learning time. Based on the results, we further provide design recommendations and in-depth discussions for future manual task learning systems.