Enes Yigitbas

Enes Yigitbas, Jonas Klauke, Sebastian Gottschalk et al.

Recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technology and the increased availability of VR-equipped devices enable a wide range of consumer-oriented applications. For novice developers, however, creating interactive scenes for VR applications is a complex and cumbersome task that requires high technical knowledge which is often missing. This hinders the potential of enabling novices to create, modify, and execute their own interactive VR scenes. Although recent authoring tools for interactive VR scenes are promising, most of them focus on expert professionals as the target group and neglect the novices with low programming knowledge. To lower the entry barrier, we provide an open-source web-based End-User Development (EUD) tool, called VREUD, that supports the rapid construction and execution of interactive VR scenes. Concerning construction, VREUD enables the specification of the VR scene including interactions and tasks. Furthermore, VREUD supports the execution and immersive experience of the created interactive VR scenes on VR head-mounted displays. Based on a user study, we have analyzed the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of VREUD which shows promising results to empower novices in creating their interactive VR scenes.

Enes Yigitbas, Simon Gorissen, Nils Weidmann et al.

Modeling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Through collaborative modeling, end-users, stakeholders, experts, and entrepreneurs are able to create a shared understanding of a system representation. While the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one of the major conceptual modeling languages in object-oriented software engineering, more and more concerns arise from the modeling quality of UML and its tool support. Among them, the limitation of the two-dimensional presentation of its notations and lack of natural collaborative modeling tools are reported to be significant. In this paper, we explore the potential of using Virtual Reality (VR) technology for collaborative UML software design by comparing it with classical collaborative software design using conventional devices (Desktop PC, Laptop). For this purpose, we have developed a VR modeling environment that offers a natural collaborative modeling experience for UML Class Diagrams. Based on a user study with 24 participants, we have compared collaborative VR modeling with conventional modeling with regard to efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Results show that the use of VR has some disadvantages concerning efficiency and effectiveness, but the user's fun, the feeling of being in the same room with a remote collaborator, and the naturalness of collaboration were increased.

Enes Yigitbas, Ivan Jovanovikj, Gregor Engels

Robots are widespread across diverse application contexts. Teaching robots to perform tasks, in their respective contexts, demands a high domain and programming expertise. However, robot programming faces high entry barriers due to the complexity of robot programming itself. Even for experts robot programming is a cumbersome and error-prone task where faulty robot programs can be created, causing damage when being executed on a real robot. To simplify the process of robot programming, we combine Augmented Reality (AR) with principles of end-user development. By combining them, the real environment is extended with useful virtual artifacts that can enable experts as well as non-professionals to perform complex robot programming tasks. Therefore, Simple Programming Environment in Augmented Reality with Enhanced Debugging (SPEARED) was developed as a prototype for an AR-assisted robot programming environment. SPEARED makes use of AR to project a robot as well as a programming environment onto the target working space. To evaluate our approach, expert interviews with domain experts from the area of industrial automation, robotics, and AR were performed. The experts agreed that SPEARED has the potential to enrich and ease current robot programming processes.

Enes Yigitbas, Kadiray Karakaya, Ivan Jovanovikj et al.

Self-adaptation approaches usually rely on closed-loop controllers that avoid human intervention from adaptation. While such fully automated approaches have proven successful in many application domains, there are situations where human involvement in the adaptation process is beneficial or even necessary. For such "human-in-the-loop" adaptive systems, two major challenges, namely transparency and controllability, have to be addressed to include the human in the self-adaptation loop. Transparency means that relevant context information about the adaptive systems and its context is represented based on a digital twin enabling the human an immersive and realistic view. Concerning controllability, the decision-making and adaptation operations should be managed in a natural and interactive way. As existing human-in-the-loop adaptation approaches do not fully cover these aspects, we investigate alternative human-in-the-loop strategies by using a combination of digital twins and virtual reality (VR) interfaces. Based on the concept of the digital twin, we represent a self-adaptive system and its respective context in a virtual environment. With the help of a VR interface, we support an immersive and realistic human involvement in the self-adaptation loop by mirroring the physical entities of the real world to the VR interface. For integrating the human in the decision-making and adaptation process, we have implemented and analyzed two different human-in-the-loop strategies in VR: a procedural control where the human can control the decision making-process and adaptations through VR interactions (human-controlled) and a declarative control where the human specifies the goal state and the configuration is delegated to an AI planner (mixed-initiative). We illustrate and evaluate our approach based on an autonomic robot system that is accessible and controlled through a VR interface.