Ubiq: A System to Build Flexible Social Virtual Reality Experiences
This addresses the problem of building flexible SVR systems for developers and educators, but it is incremental as it focuses on a toolkit rather than a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the challenge of constructing usable and efficient social virtual reality (SVR) systems by presenting Ubiq, a toolkit built on Unity that provides core functionality like connection management and avatars, and demonstrates its successful use in classroom teaching.
While they have long been a subject of academic study, social virtual reality (SVR) systems are now attracting increasingly large audiences on current consumer virtual reality systems. The design space of SVR systems is very large, and relatively little is known about how these systems should be constructed in order to be usable and efficient. In this paper we present Ubiq, a toolkit that focuses on facilitating the construction of SVR systems. We argue for the design strategy of Ubiq and its scope. Ubiq is built on the Unity platform. It provides core functionality of many SVR systems such as connection management, voice, avatars, etc. However, its design remains easy to extend. We demonstrate examples built on Ubiq and how it has been successfully used in classroom teaching. Ubiq is open source (Apache License) and thus enables several use cases that commercial systems cannot.