Mixed Reality enables individuals to visualise and interact with artefacts and environments through a combination of physical and virtual assets. It has received increased interest from the design community as a means to accelerate, enrich and enhance prototyping activities. This article concerns MR’s ability to deceive an individual through the combination of virtual and physical assets and their underlying traits (e.g., mass, size), and a user’s cognitive ability to ‘join the dots’. If properly implemented, MR could save time and resources by reducing the required prototype fidelity and the need to fully realise variants. However, there is a gap in understanding how the traits of physical and virtual assets and cognition combine to form reality. This article presents a study investigated the role mass, virtual and physical model size played on users perception of an MR prototype. The relative impact of these factors was determined by varying these parameters and assessing the user’s perceived change. The key finding from this study was that the virtual model size had a far greater influence on prototype perceived by the user. This suggests that the required physical fidelity of an MR prototype can be lower than the virtual. Furthermore, exploring size design variants can be achieved exclusively through changes to the virtual model.

The wearable products market is growing rapidly. Engaging users on an emotional level may be the key to long-term use and attracting new customers. While researchers have proposed various design approaches to realize design qualities for wearable devices, emotional needs are overlooked in the design process. To bridge this gap, we developed an approach with an online tool that uses a two-axis interactive collage for users to compare and evaluate wearable products with targeted emotion-related descriptive words. This approach enabled us to explore how users perceive products and identify types of emotions that were associated with their preferences for and perceptions of the product's form and visible characteristics. The study demonstrated this design approach to reveal insights into the relationships between product characteristics and design goals, such as user comfort, user delight, and perceived product usefulness. The results showed that products that resemble clothes were perceived as more delightful and comfortable. This study suggests that the approach can be further used to explore other design concepts or goals.