Fostering Positive Affects in Software Development Environments Using Extended Reality

Abstract

Recent research on affects has been aimed at establishing the hypothesis that a developer's productivity has a positive correlation with positive affects, such as her happiness quotient. Moreover, studies show that the software development environment itself has a huge role to play in how a developer feels during her day to day activities. In this paper, we present our early work regarding an Extended Reality based approach that virtually transforms a developer's extended and immediate environment, in a way that induces positive affects. This is aimed at assisting the developer to perform better during development related activities like programming and debugging. Salient features of the approach include a sense of presence, uniqueness and easy customization. As part of our initial research efforts, we showcase a couple of Augmented Reality based prototype implementations capable of augmenting virtual and interactive pets and scenic content in the real world. Finally, we also discuss some important future directions that we are investigating further as part of our research.