UI-Engineering Live Talk

Davide Spano gives the third seminar of the UI-Engineering Live Talk series. The title is Easing XR Development for Novices and End Users and the recording is available on YouTube

The talk is about the research effort carried out in his group to support end-users and novice programmers in creating XR environments, in particular for defining their interactive behaviour.

UI-Engineering Live Talks are bimonthly webinars given by an IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 group member or by an invited expert. Group members will participate in the online meetings, while the live stream on YouTube will be publicly available.

Abstract

The talk discusses a rule-based approach for enabling end-users and novice developers to define interactive behaviours in immersive eXtended Reality (XR) experiences. We start with a cultural and environmental preservation case study, introducing an authoring environment for first-person cinematographic video games based on 360-degree videos.

Then, we extend the technique to the end-user configuration of Virtual Reality (VR) environments. The solution relies on template environments created by expert developers and an extensible library supporting their configuration by end-users through rules in a constrained natural language.

Finally, we show how novice developers can benefit from the same rule-based representation, inspecting development examples defined through different XR toolkits. Our Unity Editor plugin can identify and describe interactions as rules, suggest similar interactions, and copy-paste interactions from examples, even if they use different toolkits. We conclude by discussing open questions and further extension of this research.