Virtual Equipment System: Toward Bag of Holding and Other Extradimensional Storage in Extended Reality

Abstract

The term ‘storage’ in real life typically refers to a container that occupies physical space, such as rooms, closets, warehouses, etc. Our interactions with items stored within are constrained by physics in real life. However, Virtual Reality allows us to ignore certain rules. Inspired by a Bag of Holding from Dungeons & Dragons and other entertainment media, we envision a storage which can store more items than the physical space the container occupies by linking it to another dimension. Users can interact with the stored item as they would with containers in VR or physically enter the storage. We refer to this approach as ‘Extradimensional Storage’. During our design and implementation of Extradimensional Storage, we identified five core components of a generic storage system, which are storage space, container, access, stored items and interactor. By altering the properties associated with the core components, we are able to implement Extradimensional Storage. We further applied the five core components to reinterpret the inventory taxonomy proposed by Cmentowski et al. Thus, our contributions include a general framework for storage, an implementation of a specialized version known as Extradimensional Storage, additions to the inventory taxonomy, and how properties of the core storage components can be utilized for different scenarios.