An Evaluation Study of Object Interaction Framework Design for XR-Enabled Games

In game development, interaction frameworks provide generic functionality for users to engage with virtual worlds and are required to enable this on nonstandard hardware such as extended reality platforms. Currently, no publicly accessible frameworks exist that implement interactive world objects in XR settings, prompting the question: if one were to be made, how and why would it be usable? This thesis explores the properties that make an XR-enabled object interaction framework usable by game developers and game designers. This thesis introduces the basic form of such a framework and the design of a set of user studies centered around this framework’s utilization in a game development workflow. User feedback is gathered for the study’s results, and is evaluated around user perception of framework expressiveness, extensibility, and ease of use. The results of the study found that users primarily judged usability through comparisons to real-world equivalents, utilization of conventional systems, object interactivity, clarity of framework components, usability of framework toolkits and these are discussed in relation to existing research on virtual object interaction.