VARSE 2024

The Second International Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality Software Engineering

Sacramento, California, United States

held in conjunction with the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2024), October 27-November 1, 2024

Introduction

News: The program is ready now.

News: We are honored to announce that Dr. Xueling Zhang from Rochester Institute of Technology will give a keynote presentation in our workshop!!! Xueling Zhang is well known for her pioneer research work on the testing of AR and VR applications.

News: The deadline is extended to Aug 17, 2024. The new deadline is firm.

News: We are now collaborating with Springer ASE Journal and selected papers from our workshop can be extended for a special issue on VARSE at ASE Journal

This workshop aims to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing in the areas of virtual and augmented reality and software engineering, as well as to nurture a research community. VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) are emerging techniques with promising applications. Major IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple all have essential investment in the area, and Facebook even have changed its name to Meta to focus on metaverse, a concept technically largely depends on virtual reality. As VR/AR platforms such as Unity, Google ARCore, Apple ARKit, and Meta for Developers are getting more and more popular, thousands of apps have been developed to explore various VR/AR applications such as gaming, education, remote communication, computer-aided operation, etc. VR/AR software development has a lot of special concerns, such as graphics design and performance optimization, management of 3D assets, testing constraints in physical world (for AR apps), and additional privacy protection (e.g., tackling leak of head and body movement information from VR/AR devices). Meanwhile, VR/AR can be adopted as an important technique to support software engineering practices that are not possible in traditional 2D interfaces. For example, 3D visualization of code and project work space may largely enhance software productivity. In this workshop, we call for talks and papers from both industry and academia to mutually advance the state of the art and practice in this area, and we expect the workshop to serve as a platform for the industry side to introduce the problems and challenges they face, as well as for the academia side to introduce their solutions and findings to the industry for broader impact.

Areas of interest include but are not restricted to:

  • Requirement analysis and specification of VR/AR software
  • Modeling and abstraction of VR/AR software
  • Testing and maintenance of VR/AR software
  • Performance measurement and optimization of VR/AR software
  • Program analysis and verification of VR/AR software
  • Security and privacy concerns in VR/AR software
  • Mining VR/AR software and software repositories and creation of dataset
  • Empirical studies on VR/AR software development process and products
  • VR/AR-based IDEs and coding tools
  • User studies of VR/AR-based software development techniques
  • VR/AR-based software visualization

Important dates

Paper submissions: August 17, 2024
Paper notifications: August 31, 2022
Paper camera ready: September 15, 2022
Workshop date: Nov 1, 2024

Submission details

Submissions must conform to the ASE 2024 formatting and submission instructions: All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the ACM Proceedings Template LaTEX users must use the \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} option. The page limit of the submission is five pages with one additional page for references.

All the submissions must not have been published elsewhere or under review elsewhere when being considered for VARSE 2024. Similar to ASE, VARSE will employ a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process.

Please submit your papers through the following EasyChair link:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=varse2024

For accepted papers (except for talk abstracts), authors are required to prepare their final submissions for the workshop proceedings based on the suggestions provided by reviewers, and one author is expected to attend the workshop and present the paper.

Organizers

Technical Program Committee

  • Huashan Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
  • Jinfu Chen, Wuhan University, China
  • In Kee Kim, University of Georgia, USA
  • Shuqing Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Yepang Liu, Southern University of Science and Technology, China
  • Bruce Maxim, University of Michigan-Dearborn
  • Rohit Mehra, Accenture Labs, India
  • Kebin Peng, East Carolina University, USA
  • Fabio Petrillo, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Canada
  • Xue Qin, Villanova University, USA
  • Xueling Zhang, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Program

Session 1: Openning and Invited Talk (9:00 - 10:00, Nov.1)

  • 9:00-9:10 Opening
    Workshop Chairs
  • 9:10-10:00 Keynote: Testing of Augmented Reality Software: Challenges and Opportunities
    Xueling Zhang, Rochester Institute of Technology
    Abstract:Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technique that blends virtual objects into real-world scenes to provide revolutionary user experience in tasks such as education, navigation, virtual meetings, gaming, etc. Due to AR applications' in-depth interaction with the physical world and manual operations, their quality is more important than traditional software because flaws in them are more likely to cause immediate human safety threats and even disasters. However, the testing of AR applications can be very challenging because part of their context and input (i.e., the real-world scenes) cannot be easily controlled and a proper testing environment often requires tremendous manual effort to prepare. In this presentation, I will introduce the most recent research efforts from my lab to address these problems and the challenges we face.
    Bio:Xueling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). She is broadly interested in software engineering, especially privacy analysis and testing of mobile and augmented reality applications. She has published multiple top conference papers in the area of augmented reality software engineering, and is a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT Research Highlights and an NSF CRII Award. For more information about her work related to AR software engineering, please see: https://xuelingz.github.io/

Session 2: Paper Presentations I (10:30 - 11:30, Nov. 1)

  • 10:30-10:50 Utilizing Generative AI for VR Exploration Testing: A Case Study
    Xue Qin, Villanova University, USA
    Garrett, Weaver, Villanova University, USA
  • 10:50-11:10 Demystifying the Privacy-Realism Dilemma in the Metaverse
    Xiaolu Zhang, The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
    Tahmid Rafi, The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
    Yuejun Guan, North China Electric Power University, China
    Shuqing Li, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
    Michael R. Lyu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • 11:10-11:30 An Empirical Study on Current Practices and Challenges of Core AR/VR Developers
    Dibyendu Brinto Bose, Virginia Tech, USA
    Chris Brown, Virginia Tech, USA

Session 3: Paper Presentations II (13:30 - 14:20, Nov. 1)

  • 13:30-13:50 Is the 3D model the way to go when presenting microservice architecture?
    Tomas Cerny, University of Arizona, USA
    Amr Elsayed, University of Arizona, USA
    Darek Gajewski, University of Arizona, USA
    Patrick Harris, Baylor University, USA
    Mia Gortney, Baylor University, USA
  • 13:50-14:10 A Study of Code Clone on Open Source VR Software
    Wenjie Huang, Chinese Academy of Science, China
    Jinfu Chen, Wuhan University, China
    Huashan Chen, Chinese Academy of Science, China
    Zhenyu Qi, University of Arizona, USA
    Xiaojia Yang, Chinese Academy of Science, China
    Kebin Peng, East Carolina University, USA
    Sen He, The University of Arizona
  • 14:10-14:15 Closing
    Workshop Chairs