Virtual Reality to Mixed Reality Graphic Conversion in Unity Preliminary Guidelines and Graphic User Interface

To date in the defence industry, virtual reality (VR) headsets are used primarily for training and simulation, while mixed reality (MR) headsets can be used in military operations. However, technological hardware advancements that blend VR and MR headset capabilities will result in increasing convergence of VR and MR applications. Accordingly, our primary objective in the current work was to present guidelines for Unity developers to convert graphical VR content to MR content in the Unity game engine. Guidelines herein address how to change camera settings to adapt from VR to MR applications, how to convert graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from VR to MR, and how to place graphical objects in MR environments. Another important objective of this work was to describe a user-controlled GUI we developed that allows real-time, progressive conversion of graphics from full VR to various levels of MR in a MR headset. This GUI provides end-users flexibility to customize their environment for gaming, training, and operational applications along an extended reality spectrum. In our future work, we are developing a tool that automates the VR to MR graphic conversion process. This tool, the guidelines, and the GUI will help researchers compare different levels of graphic content displayed in the scene and investigate the user-centered challenges that arise. It will also help Unity developers in defence, gaming, and commercial industries generate a scene in VR and quickly convert it to MR, saving the cost associated with generating separate MR scenes from scratch for multiple applications.