Software Product Line for Metaverse: Preliminary Results

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Software Product Line approach for developing Web XR applications in the Metaverse, including a features model, reusable artifacts, and an instantiation interface, aiming to address complex XR development challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a features model, core artifacts, and an instantiation interface for Web XR apps within a Software Product Line framework, tailored for Metaverse development.

Findings

Features model shows conceptual consistency for Web XR multimodal interaction

Preliminary assessment indicates the approach is promising

Future evaluation with more participants planned

Abstract

The Metaverse is a network of eXtended Reality applications (XR apps) connected to each other, over the Internet infrastructure, allowing network users, systems, and devices to access them. It is very challenging to implement solutions for XR apps, due to the combination of complex concerns that should be addressed: multiple users with non-traditional input and output devices, different hardware platforms that should be addressed, forceful interactive rates, and experimental interaction techniques, among other issues. Therefore, this work aims to present a Software Product Line (SPL)-based approach to support the development of Web XR apps. More specifically, we define a features model that represents similarities and variables (domain analysis); we defined a core composed of generic and reusable software artifacts (domain project); and we developed an interface to support the instantiation of a Web XR app family, named MetaSee Features Model Editor (domain implementation). This approach integrates with a component of the MetaSEE architecture (Metaverse for Software Engineering Education). A preliminary assessment found that Features Model has conceptual consistency from the point of view of the complexity of Web XR Apps multimodal interaction. As future work, features model and artifacts will be increased with improvements and an evaluation with a significant number of participants will be made.