Visual search is a core component of mixed reality (MR) interactions, influenced by the complexities of MR application contexts. In this paper, we investigate how prevalent factors in MR influence visual search performance and spatial regularity memory -- including the physical environment complexity, secondary task presence, virtual content depth and spatial layout configurations. Contrary to prior work, we found that the secondary auditory task did not have a significant main effect on visual search performance, while significantly elevating higher perceived workload measures in all conditions. Complex environments and varied virtual elements depths significantly hinder visual search, but did not significantly increase perceived workload measures. Finally, participants did not explicitly recognize repeated spatial configurations of virtual elements, but performed significantly better when searching repeated spatial configurations, suggesting implicit memory of spatial regularities. Our work presents novel insights on visual search and highlights key considerations when designing MR for different application contexts.

翻译：视觉搜索是混合现实（MR）交互的核心组成部分，其表现受到MR应用场景复杂性的影响。本文研究了MR中普遍存在的因素如何影响视觉搜索性能与空间规律记忆——包括物理环境复杂性、次级任务的存在、虚拟内容的深度以及空间布局配置。与先前研究不同，我们发现次级听觉任务对视觉搜索性能并未产生显著的主效应，但在所有条件下均显著提升了被试感知到的工作负荷。复杂环境与变化的虚拟元素深度显著阻碍了视觉搜索，但并未显著增加感知工作负荷。最后，被试并未明确识别出虚拟元素重复出现的空间配置，但在搜索重复空间配置时表现显著更优，这表明了对空间规律存在内隐记忆。本研究为视觉搜索提供了新的见解，并强调了针对不同应用场景设计MR时需考量的关键因素。