The IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 is happy to announce the third seminar of the Engineering Live Talk series. Live talks are bimonthly webinars given by a 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.
This month, the talk will be given by the WG chair, Davide Spano. 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. The talk will be given on the 28th of September, 15:30 CET.
The link to attend is the following: https://youtube.com/live/mXDPX8CSEGQ?feature=share
Easing XR Development for Novices and End Users
This 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.
Short Bio
Davide Spano is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Cagliari, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science since 2019. He got his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in 2013.
He has been the chair of the IFIP 2.7/13.4 WG on User Interface Engineering since June 2022 and the Delegate for the Research of the Extended Committee of SIGCHI-Italy. He is the vice-director of the GLab, an interdepartmental research centre (Architecture and Civil Engineering and Mathematics and Computer Science). I have been a member of the Model-Based User Interface WG of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Davide Spano is a member of the Senior Programme Committee of high-level international conferences in Human-Computer Interaction (e.g., IUI, INTERACT, EICS, NordiCHI). He has been the principal investigator of European, National and Regional research projects. I have been an associate editor for a special issue in ACM TiiS and IJHCS by Elsevier.