The XRC Toolkit is a collection of tools and 3D interaction techniques, developed at the XR Collaboratory, for accelerating AR/VR prototyping
THE PROBLEM
High-fidelity prototyping for AR/VR interaction design can be challenging and time consuming. As the number of projects utilizing AR/VR continues to increase in academia, more researchers are faced with the challenge of creating prototypes that can be easily maintained and applied across different research projects.
The users in our case are XRC developers, our students, and collaborators, such as Cornell faculty and their PhD students.
MY ROLE
As the Director of the XR Collaboratory at Cornell Tech, I lead the project, including system architecture, design, and engineering, and managed a team of two prototypers.
Team: Harald Haraldsson (XR Collaboratory), Sky Rolnick (XR Collaboratory), William Leon (XR Collaboratory)
OBJECTIVES
Our goals were to:
Accelerate the implementation of AR/VR prototypes
Make prototypes interoperable
Improve project continuity
THE SOLUTION
To achieve these goals, we developed the XRC Toolkit, a collection of Unity packages (UPM) containing implementations of various tools and techniques for AR/VR interaction.
The XRC Toolkit accelerates prototyping by providing utility packages and ready-to-use components, along with instructions and best-practices for package development and distribution
The XRC Toolkit enables interoperability by providing guidelines on package architecture and design principles, increasing consistency between prototypes
The XRC Toolkit improves continuity for projects, as each XRC Toolkit package is fully documented with installation instructions, scripting API, and changelog
Our users engage with the XRC Toolkit in the following ways:
Consume XRC Toolkit packages in their own projects
Contribute to the XRC Toolkit
Use the XRC Toolkit guidelines as a reference for their own prototyping efforts
Package Example
XRC Go-Go
The Go-Go interaction technique is a classic manipulation technique, providing the user with an arm-extension capability. We implemented the technique as a package in the XRC Toolkit, extending the XR Interaction Toolkit.
Original paper: Ivan Poupyrev, Mark Billinghurst, Suzanne Weghorst, and Tadao Ichikawa. 1996. The go-go interaction technique: non-linear mapping for direct manipulation in VR. In Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '96). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 79–80. https://doi.org/10.1145/237091.237102
The XRC Go-Go implementation
The full package documentation can be found here: https://xrcollaboratory.github.io/edu.cornell.xrc.interaction.gogo
XRC Toolkit
Impact
The XRC Toolkit and its guidelines are now used in every new prototype implemented at the XR Collaboratory
All student-led independent research projects at the XR Collaboratory are now implemented as packages following the XRC Toolkit guidelines
All assignments and group projects in CS 5678: 3D User Interfaces are now implemented as XRC Toolkit-compliant packages
Our faculty collaborators have access to the XRC Toolkit and use it as a development reference
We launched the XR Collaboratory Prototyping Grant, where the XRC Toolkit is a vital component
XRC Toolkit
Selected Packages
Featured
Documentation