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An authoring tool for democratizing the creation of high-quality VR experiences

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Abstract

The contribution of this paper is toward three directions, namely (a) in identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the current state-of-the-art methods that allow laymen in programming to author VR experiences; (b) in examining how easily non-experts in programming can author VR experiences by analysing the responses from several testers toward easiness and usability when using the proposed authoring tool; and (c) in treating a serious disadvantage of state-of-the-art methods, namely the low quality in graphics by proposing a novel methodology for transpiling web-based formats such as three.js into high performance runtime formats like Unity3D. The proposed authoring tool is a plugin for WordPress that exploits its interfaces and database for providing a 3D editor suitable for authoring VR experiences. It embeds the proposed methodology which achieves an one-to-one matching between three.js, WordPress and Unity3D entities to achieve transpiling. Evaluation results indicate the positive adoption of non-experts in programming, but there is still several improvements to be made.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union H2020 Horizon Programme under grant agreement 825585, project HELIOS: A Context-aware Distributed Social Networking Framework. The authors would like to thank: Dr. Mavromanolakis Georgios and Dr. Sofoklis Sotiriou from Ellinogermaniki Agogi School (http://ea.gr), as well as Prof. Georgios Yannakakis and Prof. Antonios Liapis from the University of Malta—Institute of Digital Games (http://www.game.edu.mt/) for the collaboration during the evaluation of the proposed tool; also Prof. Isabelle De Groote from the Anthropology Dept. of Liverpool John Moore University (LJMU, https://www.ljmu.ac.uk) for providing a 3D model for demonstrating the authoring tool (Figs. 4 and 7).

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  1. Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Information Technologies Institute (ITI), 6km Charilaou-Thermi street, P.O. Box 60361, 57001, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitrios Ververidis, Panagiotis Migkotzidis, Efstathios Nikolaidis, Eleftherios Anastasovitis, Anastasios Papazoglou Chalikias, Spiros Nikolopoulos & Ioannis Kompatsiaris

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  1. Dimitrios Ververidis
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  2. Panagiotis Migkotzidis
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Correspondence to Dimitrios Ververidis.

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Ververidis, D., Migkotzidis, P., Nikolaidis, E. et al. An authoring tool for democratizing the creation of high-quality VR experiences. Virtual Reality 26, 105–124 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-021-00541-2

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