Toward an IoT Framework for the New Generation of XR Applications

In recent years, industry and academia have grown interested in Extended Reality (XR) and the development of creative and immersive applications that take advantage of it. This interest has led to new forms of interaction and immersion being considered for this type of application. However, many of these applications are still tied to traditional input devices, such as a mouse, touchscreen, or game controller, and output to mundane output devices, such as screens or projectors. With the democratization of affordable Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, there is an opportunity to integrate these devices into the next generation of creative applications. However, such integrations may be costly or involve much custom work to develop. This work aims to bridge this gap and create a framework that can be used by developers of such applications to leverage IoT devices for the creation of digital twins or as input and output devices for their applications, opening up software development to a whole new world of possibilities. Throughout this research work, a framework to enable the integration of any IoT device into the next generation of XR applications was proposed, as well as a detailed proposal of a pairing scheme for IoT devices that allows them to be matched with confidence to clients automatically. Performance studies conducted using the industry standard IoT communication protocol MQTT proved the viability of the proposed framework in providing reliable means of low-latency communication for wireless input devices.