From off-site to on-site: A Flexible Framework for XR Prototyping in Sports Spectating

Developing and researching Extended Reality (XR) prototypes for sports spectating is challenging as on-site testing opportunities are limited and often cannot be used for development and debugging. In addition, conducting user studies and evaluating prototypes within such a large unconstrained live event environment can be problematic. These limitations created a need for a flexible XR prototype development framework that can be used off-site for testing and debugging as well as for user studies, while still providing the option to being directly applied on-site during a sports event.We developed a framework for a flexible XR prototyping process with different levels of fidelity. The framework integrated our experiences with the challenges of working remotely to create solutions for an on-site problem. We use our proposed framework to demonstrate how to develop different XR prototypes, such as a miniature lab prototype, a hybrid use-case using indirect AR, an off-site VR prototype and the actual on-site AR prototype.The proposed framework allows us to tackle our overall goal of using Augmented Reality (AR) to provide situated visualizations to on-site sports spectators. Our approach can be applied in AR and XR projects where access to the targeted environment is limited.