Designers, the Stage Is Yours! Medium-Fidelity Prototyping of Augmented & Virtual Reality Interfaces with 360theater

Abstract

While augmented and virtual reality technologies are becoming mainstream, it is still technically challenging and time-consuming to create new applications. Many designers draw from traditional low-fidelity prototyping methods that do not lend themselves well to designing in 3D. Developers use high-end programming frameworks such as Unity and Unreal which require significant hardware/software setups and coding skills. We see a gap in the medium-fidelity range where there is an opportunity for new tools to leverage the advantages of 360° content for AR/VR prototyping. Existing tools, however, have only limited support for 3D geometry, spatial and proxemic interactions, puppeteering, and storytelling. We present 360theater, a new method and a tool for rapid prototyping of AR/VR experiences, which takes dioramas into the virtual realm by enhancing 360° video capture with 3D geometry and simulating spatial interactions via Wizard of Oz. Our comparative evaluation of techniques with novice and experienced AR/VR designers shows that 360theater can close the gap and achieve a higher fidelity and more realistic AR/VR prototypes than comparable methods.

Designing Guided User Tasks in VR Embodied Experiences

“…Recently, Speicher et al [32] developed a system for creating extended reality experiences (both augmented and virtual reality) from paper prototypes. The workflow consists of hand-crafting the scene from paper materials, capturing the scene with a 360°camera, and importing it into their application.…”

“…a mouse, controller, gesture) [2,19,26,29,34] instead of for user tasks (e.g. "take an object", "move to location"), and hence do not allow systematic task validation (3) there is no temporal representation of the world and user state changes, and (4) while some works allow the generation or design of 3D content and interactive scenes from high level descriptions [8,13,23,24,32,36], these are not semantically annotated environments, which firstly, do not have customizable interactive possibilities or user task management, and secondly do not allow task and interactivity information Table 1. Summary table for comparing related contributions including their focus (ontology or framework), application scenarios, and other observations.…”

“…A positioning summarizing limitations in existing work is indicated for ontology and frameworks respectively. System implementations (with source code) were found for [4,9,13,20,29,32].…”

“…Framework [32] virtual and augmented reality wizard of oz system with medium fidelity paper prototyping for more simple scenes and limited interactivity [20] augmented reality; e-commerce [19] industrial VR applications knowledge-based approach [23] rehabilitation for wheelchair users in VR optimization approach to generating constrained 3D scenes [8] general collaborative and interactive VR environments offers high level control over entity relations and interactions [29] 2D interfaces; based on entitycomponent system Positioning on framework: existing frameworks are mostly designed with targeted scenarios in mind; intersubjectivity with task definition and guidance, and post-scenario analysis of UX and intentionality are areas that have not yet been explored together.…”

Analyzing and understanding embodied interactions in virtual reality systems

“…Bouville et al [1] built the system #FIVE on the modelization of interactive VR environments by the annotation of elements composing the environment with properties, similar to GUsT-3D ontology part presented in part 4 however without the creation of a DSL. [9] worked on a prototyping workflow for AR applications, immersing the designer in the modelized experience with a miniature physical representation of the AR experience. By showing the designer a visualization of how the user will perceive and live the experience, this work helps improve the intersubjectivity between the designer creating the experience and the user living it.…”