Immersive Notification Framework: Adaptive & Plausible Notifications in Virtual Reality

Notifications in everyday virtual reality (VR) applications are currently realized by displaying generic pop-ups within the immersive virtual environment (IVE) containing the message of the sender. However, this approach tends to break the immersion of the user. In order to preserve the immersion and the suspension of disbelief, we propose to adapt the method of notification to the current situation of the user in the IVE and the messages' priority. We propose the concept of adaptive and immersive notifications in VR and introduce an open-source framework which implements our approach. The framework aims to serve as an easy-to-extend code base for developers of everyday VR applications. As an example, we implemented a messaging application that can be used by a non-immersed person to send text messages to an immersed user. We describe the concept and our open-source framework and discuss ideas for future work.