Many simulated team training systems developed across the Department of Defense, e.g., the Army's Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT), focus on high fidelity systems that require high initial expense and maintenance costs, require trainees to travel to a specific training site, and cannot be easily updated or reconfigured to reflect changes to the operational equipment/environment. The Army's future Synthetic Training Environment may leverage advances in virtual and augmented reality technology to provide mixed reality training that balances physical components and virtual assets, which would decrease the cost of networked training environments and increase reconfigurability and mobility. However, indiscriminate use of virtual technologies could remove sensory cues critical to task performance, thereby decreasing training value. Further, without an understanding of tasks and users, inappropriate virtual or augmented reality headsets could result in negative training and user sickness. A human-centric sensory task analysis can be effectively used to identify and optimize system fidelity- virtualizing what can be, while maintaining physical components required for training value. The purpose of this article is to introduce a human factors approach that capitalizes on sensory task analysis to maximize training effectiveness while minimizing cost, leading to maximal return on training investment. The goal is to provide practitioners with guidance for the effective use of innovative mixed reality technologies in training systems. In this study, using a sensory task analysis, design guidelines were derived for a mixed reality tactical trainer for the M1 Abrams, identifying constituent cues that needed to remain veridical and those that could be virtualized. These guidelines specified (a) when VR/AR would best be implemented within a complex training simulator based on training objectives, tasks, and environment, (b), VR/AR headset parameters to consider for optimized training value, and (c) software design elements unique to VR/AR, such as how to design to minimize user sickness.