Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said on the 21st that it developed a next-generation extended reality (XR) comic platform that lets a wide range of readers enjoy webtoons three-dimensionally in real spaces.
KAIST School of Electrical Engineering Professor Ian Oakley's research team presented key design principles and development directions that next-generation XR comics should have through a user study involving 15 participants, including human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, actual webtoon creators, and readers. The team developed a new platform, "ComiXR," for reading and directly producing comics in XR environments, and had participants convert existing print comics into XR environments themselves to produce and experience them.
To apply a sense of space that is difficult to realize on screens, spatial audio, and eye tracking to comics, the team built the ComiXR platform based on Meta Quest Pro.
Wearing the device, experiment participants freely placed three-dimensional (3D) characters, speech balloons, and onomatopoeia in an actual room to build the most comfortable and immersive comic space for themselves. The experiment found that readers strongly preferred direction that actively used the depth of real space over simply displaying flat comic pages in virtual space.
Professor Ian Oakley said, "This research does more than render comics in 3D; it shows how to design the comics of the future by considering the reader's space, gaze, and movement."