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

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

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.