Enhancing Virtual Reality Systems with Smart Wearable Devices

The proliferation of wearable and smartphone devices with embedded sensors has enabled researchers and engineers to study and understand user behavior at an extremely high fidelity, particularly for use in industries such as entertainment, health, and retail. However, identified user patterns are yet to be integrated into modern systems with immersive capabilities, such as VR systems, which still remain constrained by limited application interaction models exposed to developers. In this paper, we present Smart VR, a platform that allows developers to seamlessly incorporate user behavior into VR apps. We present the high-level architecture of Smart VR, and show how it facilitates communication, data acquisition, and context recognition between smart wearable devices and mediator systems (e.g., smartphones, tablets, PCs). We demonstrate Smart VR in the context of a VR app for retail stores to show how it can be used to substitute the requirement of cumbersome input devices (e.g., mouse, keyboard) with more natural means of user-app interaction (e.g., user gestures such as swiping and tapping) to improve user experience.