Is Virtual Reality Product Development different?: An Empirical Study on VR Product Development Practices

With the rise of Virtual Reality (VR) footprint in many organizations, it was unclear if traditional software engineering practices are still exercised during VR product development. As part of our research, we conducted a year-long multi-level exploratory study to understand the various software development practices within VR product development teams. An empirical study on VR practitioners from 6 different countries was done to examine their development strategies, methods, and models adopted along with the various challenges faced during the course of VR product release. We found that VR practitioners adopted hybrid Software Engineering approaches in VR product development. In this paper, we present our insights from the empirical study and stress on the need for a diverse software development model for VR products.

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