Toward a VR-Native Live Programming Environment
Leonard Geier, Clemens Tiedt, Tom Beckmann, Marcel Taeumel, Robert Hirschfeld · 2022
Fast feedback loops between performing code changes and seeing their outcome help developers to be productive. For development of virtual reality (VR) applications, developers use a separate device, forcing them to switch devices whenever they want to test their application, thus significantly increasing the length of the feedback loop. In this paper, we describe a prototypical development environment that allows writing VR applications while inside VR. Unlike previous work in this area that projected traditional 2D editors into the 3D world, we explore the use of direct manipulation in a structured editor for the general-purpose programming language Smalltalk. We present and discuss insights from a preliminary user study with four participants. Our findings demonstrate that the concept does work if users are given prior instructions, especially for smaller features where direct feedback is valuable, but ergonomics of both the hardware and our prototype have to be improved before extended programming sessions are viable.