Prototyping a VR Sandbox for Scene Customization without 3D Authoring Skills

Virtual Reality (VR) and simulation continue po-sitioning as suitable tools for fine-tuning processes otherwise impossible in real life. Such is the case of Aether, a mobile service robot for elderly care developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aether's development was negatively impacted due to restrictions placed on accessing long-term care facilities that impeded testing object tracking, elderly tracking, fall detection, and human-robot interactions. Our efforts to maximize Aether's development led us to create a digital twin where the core functionality is replicated to train the machine learning modules to optimize the robot's responses before real-world deployment. However, the digital twin creation requires significant authoring to ensure the virtual environment matches the real one by employing 3D technical artistry skills, which demands a professional knowledgeable in this domain. This paper presents a sandbox prototype for scene customization that allows importing, positioning, scaling, and saving changes for mobile robot simulation. Our preliminary testing of the sandbox has focused on usability to understand how the setting up of the environment is perceived. Preliminary results indicate that the sandbox is usable with improvements pertaining to improving the manipulation of the objects.