Abstract |
Applications of the Extended Reality (XR) spectrum, a superset of Mixed, Augmented and
Virtual Reality, are gaining prominence and can be employed in various areas, such as virtual
museums. Those incarnating a virtual museum are considered digital heritage applications
and are of utmost importance to the preservation of cultural heritage. Unfortunately, the majority of them are used to operate only in one of the above realities. For instance, we notice
many applications that exist for Virtual Reality, which cannot be found for Augmented Reality mobile devices.
The lack of virtual museum applications across the XR spectrum is a real shortcoming. There
are many advantages resulting from this problem’s solution. Firstly, releasing such an application across the XR spectrum could contribute to discovering its most suitable reality.
Moreover, it could be more immersive within a particular reality, depending on its context.
Furthermore, by releasing such an application across the XR spectrum, its availability increases to a broader range of users. For instance, if it is released both in Virtual and
Augmented Reality, it is automatically accessible to users that may lack the possession of a
Virtual Reality headset, but not of a mobile device (capable of supporting AR). As a result,
the preservation of cultural heritage increases rapidly.
The question that arises at this point, would be “Is it possible for a full s/w application stack
to be converted across XR without sacrificing UI/UX in a semi-automatic way?”. It may be
quite challenging, depending on the architecture and application implementation.
Through our work, we encountered such challenges as well, in two different situations. Specifically, the transition of a virtual cultural heritage playground application from Virtual to
Mixed Reality and respectively, of a virtual museum application from Augmented to Virtual
Reality. We performed a manual XR transition in these cases, noting the critical steps needed alongside this procedure. As a result, we attempt to overcome this challenge utilizing our
XR Transition Framework that we created based on our findings and will present in this thesis.
We present our framework, the “XR Transition Manager”, in the context of digital heritage
applications (virtual museums). It is an XR transition library, able to manage the underlying
software stack for different platforms or realities across the XR spectrum, depending on the
developers’ choice. Through a simple user interface, developers are able to set their preferences. Specifically, this framework automatically allows transitions across the XR spectrum
between Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. It also reduces the development time while
increasing the XR availability of digital heritage applications, encouraging developers to release them across the XR spectrum, thus contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage.
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