FlowMatic: An Immersive Authoring Tool for Creating Interactive Scenes in Virtual Reality

Immersive authoring is a paradigm that makes Virtual Reality (VR) application development easier by allowing programmers to create VR content while immersed in the virtual environment. In this paradigm, programmers manipulate programming primitives through direct manipulation and get immediate feedback on their program's state and output. However, existing immersive authoring tools have a low ceiling; their programming primitives are intuitive but can only express a limited set of static relationships between elements in a scene. In this paper, we introduce FlowMatic, an immersive authoring tool that raises the ceiling of expressiveness by allowing programmers to specify reactive behaviors---behaviors that react to discrete events such as user actions, system timers, or collisions. FlowMatic also introduces primitives for programmatically creating and destroying new objects, for abstracting and re-using functionality, and for importing 3D models. Importantly, FlowMatic uses novel visual representations to allow these primitives to be represented directly in VR. We also describe the results of a user study that illustrates the usability advantages of FlowMatic relative to a 2D authoring tool and we demonstrate its expressiveness through several example applications that would be impossible to implement with existing immersive authoring tools. By combining a visual program representation with expressive programming primitives and a natural User Interface (UI) for authoring programs, FlowMatic shows how programmers can build fully interactive virtual experiences with immersive authoring.