Plug the Guitar In Before You Put the Headset On: Co-designing a Mixed Reality Collaborative Application with Professional Musicians

Mixed reality (MR) technologies hold promise for distributed musical collaboration, yet the needs of professional musicians remain underexplored. We conducted a set of co-design workshops with 24 professional musicians, organized into six four-piece bands, to envision future MR systems for networked music performance. Using a three-phase process (hands-on MR experience, individual brainwriting, and collaborative consensus-building), we identified core requirements that challenge current MR paradigms. Professional musicians operate from an “Audio-First” framework where sonic experience constitutes the primary reality, contradicting visual-first MR approaches. Five unanimous requirements emerged: audio-first workflow, support for non-verbal communication, personalized audio control, spatial layout customization, and plug-and-play simplicity. Other high-consensus themes included real-time voice communication and realistic avatar representation. Taken together, our findings reveal that professional creative collaboration demands fundamentally different design priorities than traditional office-centered collaborative MR applications, requiring systems that support established workflows and nonverbal communication channels while prioritizing workflow preservation over visual immersion.