Enhancing Virtual Reality Systems with Smart Wearable Devices

Abstract

The proliferation of wearable and smartphone devices with embedded sensors has enabled researchers and
engineers to study and understand user behavior at an extremely high fidelity, particularly for use in industries such
as entertainment, health, and retail. However, identified user patterns are yet to be integrated into modern systems with
immersive capabilities, such as VR systems, which still remain constrained by limited application interaction models exposed
to developers. In this paper, we present SmartVR, a platform that allows developers to seamlessly incorporate user behavior
into VR apps. We present the high-level architecture of SmartVR, and show how it facilitates communication, data
acquisition, and context recognition between smart wearable devices and mediator systems (e.g., smartphones, tablets, PCs).
We demonstrate SmartVR in the context of a VR app for retail stores to show how it can be used to substitute the requirement
of cumbersome input devices (e.g., mouse, keyboard) with more natural means of user-app interaction (e.g., user gestures such as swiping and tapping) to improve user experience.