Scenior: An Immersive Visual Scripting system based on VR Software Design Patterns for Experiential Training
This addresses the problem of limited authoring tools for VR training in industrial sectors, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing visual scripting and VR design patterns.
The authors tackled the lack of accessible tools for creating VR training scenarios by proposing Scenior, a visual scripting platform that enables rapid prototyping and modification, and a user evaluation showed that users of all programming skill levels could effectively use it.
Virtual reality (VR) has re-emerged as a low-cost, highly accessible consumer product, and training on simulators is rapidly becoming standard in many industrial sectors. However, the available systems are either focusing on gaming context, featuring limited capabilities or they support only content creation of virtual environments without any rapid prototyping and modification. In this project, we propose a code-free, visual scripting platform to replicate gamified training scenarios through rapid prototyping and VR software design patterns. We implemented and compared two authoring tools: a) visual scripting and b) VR editor for the rapid reconstruction of VR training scenarios. Our visual scripting module is capable to generate training applications utilizing a node-based scripting system whereas the VR editor gives user/developer the ability to customize and populate new VR training scenarios directly from the virtual environment. We also introduce action prototypes, a new software design pattern suitable to replicate behavioral tasks for VR experiences. In addition, we present the training scenegraph architecture as the main model to represent training scenarios on a modular, dynamic and highly adaptive acyclic graph based on a structured educational curriculum. Finally, a user-based evaluation of the proposed solution indicated that users - regardless of their programming expertise - can effectively use the tools to create and modify training scenarios in VR.