A Framework to Develop VR Interaction Techniques Based on OpenInterface and AFreeCA

Implementing appropriate interaction for Virtual Reality (VR) applications is one of the most challenging tasks that a developer has to face. This challenge is due to both technical and theoretical factors. First, from a technical point of view, the developer does not only have to deal with nonstandard devices, he has to facilitate their use in a parallel a coordinated way, interweaving the fields of 3D and multimodal interaction. Secondly, from a theoretical point of view, he has to design the interaction almost from scratch, as a standard set of interaction techniques and interactive tasks has not been identified. All these factors are reflected in the absence of appropriate tools to implement VR interaction techniques. In this paper, some existing tools that aim at the development of VR interaction techniques are studied, analysing their strengths and, more specifically, their shortcomings, such as the difficulties to integrate them with any VR platform or their absence of a strong conceptual background. Following that, a framework to implement VR interaction techniques is described that provides the required support for multimodal interaction and, also, uses experience gained from the study of the former tools to avoid previous mistakes. Finally, the usage of the resulting framework is illustrated with the development of the interaction techniques of a sample application.