AUIT – the Adaptive User Interfaces Toolkit for Designing XR Applications

Abstract

Adaptive user interfaces can improve experiences in Extended Reality (XR) applications by adapting interface elements according to the user’s context. Although extensive work explores different adaptation policies, XR creators often struggle with their implementation, which involves laborious manual scripting. The few available tools are underdeveloped for realistic XR settings where it is often necessary to consider conflicting aspects that affect an adaptation. We fill this gap by presenting AUIT, a toolkit that facilitates the design of optimization-based adaptation policies. AUIT allows creators to flexibly combine policies that address common objectives in XR applications, such as element reachability, visibility, and consistency. Instead of using rules or scripts, specifying adaptation policies via adaptation objectives simplifies the design process and enables creative exploration of adaptations. After creators decide which adaptation objectives to use, a multi-objective solver finds appropriate adaptations in real-time. A study showed that AUIT allowed creators of XR applications to quickly and easily create high-quality adaptations.