Studying the Benefits and Challenges of Immersive Dataflow Programming

FlowMatic: An Immersive Authoring Tool for Creating Interactive Scenes in Virtual Reality

“…Further, text-based languages usually have a steep learning curve for end users. Therefore, some previous work has explored incorporating VPLs, especially datafow programming languages, into immersive authoring systems [40,23,21,12,52].…”

“…More recently, Ens et al [12] built an immersive authoring system using a visual datafow representation in VR for specifying behaviors of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This pattern of embedding datafow programming languages in the 3D immersive environments was found to be intuitive and easy for both novice programmers and end users [52,23].…”

“…color changed when being selected). The closest related work to ours is [52], which presents an immersive data-fow programming interface for novice programmers to author VR scenes. The key limitation of the interface is that it is unable to express discrete events and behaviors triggered by those events.…”

“…switch between running and editing the program [52]. This is partly because they may accidentally trigger the actions in their application while they are using the controllers to manipulate the programming primitives.…”

“…Immersive authoring also enables a more fuid workfow by offering immediate feedback as the user designs and programs a virtual scene. Several immersive authoring tools allow users to create static 3D models or sketches [34,3,13,31], and others allow programmers to declare dynamic relationships between object properties [40,22,12,52]. However, existing immersive authoring systems cannot express reactive behaviors, a fundamental requirement for most practical VR applications.…”