A Framework for XReality Serious Games

Virtual and Augmented Reality capabilities have advanced remarkably in the last decade. Serious Games in VR and AR have become not only possible, but their development has become rapid and inexpensive. Commercial devices and development environments are now sufficient to enable data-driven application development for research focused applications. Despite these outstanding innovations, Virtual and Augmented Reality present unique design challenges in the research space. Development of five different data-driven research applications in VR and AR over the last several years has illustrated that data collection in such applications has considerations unique to XReality. Working from a unified framework – that is, beginning with an analysis plan, developing with an analyst as part of the team, and developing with an understanding that virtual data collection has additional requirements that don’t apply when one can rely on the constancy of real-world physics – is critical to the advancement of these technologies as valid and valuable research tools. This paper presents such a framework for developing data-driven Serious Games for research purposes.