Abstract

The state of the art graphical user interface (GUI) works on a basis of widget lifetimes that are bound to objects or handles. This common approach which is called retained mode GUI (or RMGUI) has a few drawbacks. The application data has to be kept in sync with UI manually. Maintaining good code structure can also be challenging due to widget lifetime management in RMGUIs, where widget creation, update and deletion are explicit. An alternative approach is the immediate mode GUI (or IMGUI) which differs from RMGUI in that no UI widget has a lifetime. On every UI update, the user informs the IMGUI system over what should be visible on the screen. As a result the data is never out of date. IMGUIs are already widely used in games and game tooling. In this work the possibilities of a IMGUI system in the context of Mixed Reality are explored. The user interface will no longer be two dimensional; it can be attached to objects in 3 dimensional space or even to parts of the user, like a "hand menu". It is analyzed how IMGUI can help mitigate the additional complexities of GUIs in the MR setting and how the needed flexibility can be achieved.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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