Emulating Your eXtended World: An Emulation Environment for XR App Development

Application development for eXtended Reality (XR) platforms are similar in many ways with the development of applications for traditional computing environments (e.g., PCs and smartphones). However, XR applications differ in the fact that they need to consider the increased dimensions of user input coming from various peripherals such as head motion, gamepad controls and hand gestures. Such diversity (and complexity) in input make it difficult for XR application programs to be tested properly during the development process, and complicates the development by introducing additional levels of “physical-device” testing overhead. In this work, based on a preliminary survey conducted with 10 XR application developers, we identify the core obstacles they experience in the application testing process and present the design of XREmul. To ease an XR application's systematic and functional testing overhead, XREmul provides a set of input abstraction APIs for the application to easily access data streams coming from heterogeneous input sources, and offers a record-and-replay feature for various input modalities. This allows the application developers to easily reproduce uncommon errors generated from user inputs and can reduce the testing time for XR application functionalities. We conduct a user study to quantify the impact of testing time reduction, and also collect qualitative feedback from professional XR application developers using XREmul as a prototype system for offering an effective emulation environment for XR application development.