André Helgert, Sabrina Eimler, Tom Gross

• Although Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool in today’s Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, the technical hurdle of creating high-quality and customized VR applications for one’s own research prevents its comprehensive use. To address this problem, we present a VR authoring tool for HRI research, allowing researchers to create individual study designs in a simplified manner with predefined environments, robots, and measurement methods. Furthermore, the authoring tool has a highly modularized structure so that it can be adapted to a wide range of use cases. Technical details are presented, covering UI/UX decisions in the study design process and the visual programming interface for the creation of the interaction scheme of the robot, as well as the data management system that transfers researchers’ study setups into a suitable VR application. The VR authoring tool is intended to bridge the gap between the practical applicability of VR as a research tool and the required technical implementation expertise for VR applications.