Understanding Creators Mental Models in Immersive Virtual Reality Programming

Empowering users - independently of their programming expertise - to create dynamic elements and scenes of virtual environments directly while immersed in them has gained increasing attention in recent years to reach the full potential of immersive technologies applicability. Immersive authoring tools seem to be an outstanding solution to provide developers, creators, and researchers a natural way to program their virtual environments, supporting their goals, needs, and creativity. The study of mental models and reasoning strategies of users with different levels of expertise in programming while engaging with these tools could shed light on potential, limits, and open challenges to create and design immersive authoring tools that can effectively support individuals who work with immersive technologies. In this paper, we present a study design that aims to investigate reasoning strategies and mental representations of Virtual Reality researchers, developers, and creators while creating new dynamic scenes through an immersive authoring tool named FlowMatic.