Rapid Prototyping of Low-Fidelity Virtual Reality Hardware: Lessons Learned

Rapid prototyping is an affordable and efficient method to explore novel designs for extended reality (XR) hardware and interactions. Prototyping is especially advantageous for smartphone-based virtual reality (VR) design as the hardware is inherently low-cost. The advancement of mobile VR hardware and interactions is an underrepresented area of research that has great potential to improve the inclusion of XR devices. Prototyping provides an opportunity for designers to explore potential solutions to mobile VR interaction and hardware in an efficient and cost-effective manner. In this work, we reflect on our experiences in prototyping a low-fidelity VR input device for mobile VR and identify a three-phase iterative process for prototyping low-fi VR input devices. We encourage members of the community to adopt this process to explore novel methods for low-fi VR hardware and interactions.