Ben Yang

An XR GUI for Visualizing Messages in ECS Architectures

Ben Yang, Xichen He, Jace Li, Carmine Elvezio, Steven Feiner

IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2024. Demo.

Headset view of a city street crossing. Nearby traffic lights are outlined in orange and farther ones in bluish green, red arrowheads run along the links between them, blue arrowheads mark messages in transit, and the right controller is outlined in yellow.
Fig. 1. Entities in a street scene are outlined by how far a message has propagated, yellow for the right controller, then orange and bluish green for successive sets of traffic lights. Red arrowheads trace the links, and blue arrowheads are messages traveling along them.

Abstract

Entity--Component--System (ECS) architectures are fundamental to many systems for developing extended reality (XR) applications. These applications often contain complex scenes and require intricately connected application logic to connect components together, making debugging and analysis difficult. Graph-based tools have been created to show actions in ECS-based scene hierarchies, but few address interactions that go beyond traditional hierarchical communication. To address this, we present an XR GUI for Mercury (a toolkit to handle cross-component ECS communication) that allows developers to view and edit relationships and interactions between scene entities in Mercury.

Video

Still from the video: a city street with a traffic light, seen from the headset with tracked hands. Opens on YouTube.
Video 1. The XR GUI in a street scene, alongside the developer working in the Unity editor. 1 min 20 s; opens on YouTube.

Cite

B. Yang, X. He, J. Li, C. Elvezio, and S. Feiner, “An XR GUI for Visualizing Messages in ECS Architectures,” in Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2024, pp. 640–641, doi: 10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct64951.2024.00189.

@inproceedings{yang2024xrgui,
  title={An XR GUI for Visualizing Messages in ECS Architectures},
  author={Yang, Ben and He, Xichen and Li, Jace and Elvezio, Carmine and Feiner, Steven},
  booktitle={2024 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)},
  pages={640--641},
  year={2024},
  doi={10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct64951.2024.00189}
}