Interactive app
An interactive app, also referred to as an interactive application [1][2][3], is a type of web application and/or mobile app that responds to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving 2D & 3D images, animation, video, audio, and gamification (or game mechanics). It may run on various devices such as smartphones, tablets, PCs, and many other devices.
The fundamental elements of interactive apps lie in art, vision, and technology. Through art, people perceive information as it is a projection of how they see objects and environments. Vision helps people to perceive the displayed information through the senses - sight, hearing, touch, and more. Technology can connect the real and virtual worlds through projections of objects and surroundings. When all these aspects are combined together, users of interactive apps enter the world of 3D content that reflects the real world.
The main purpose of interactive apps is to connect people with computers and create interactivity between them. This means that software receives and reacts to inputs from app users. As a result, people get information in a form of two- or three-dimensional objects, visually moving structures, and virtual environments.
Interactive apps are usually used as a tool for engagement and productivity increase in such areas as education, marketing, human resources, sales, product presentation, etc.
Key Elements
Interactive apps at its core are a combination of gamification, digital art, and XR.
Gamification
Gamification is an implementation of game mechanics to non-gaming areas such as business operations, sales, marketing, human resources, and administration in order to increase productivity and people engagement into processes.
Digital Art
Digital Art is a display of 2D or 3D models or any visual information on a desktop or mobile device. It is a transformation of traditional art into a digital plane. It includes computer-generated animated imagery, computer-generated 3D imagery, visual media, 3D computer graphics, simulation, etc.
Extended Reality
Extended reality is the utilization of interactive effects to perform a human-machine interaction using technologies and wearables. It includes virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.
Types
Interactive apps can be classified by various methods.
Simulation
Simulation is a type of interactive app that allows to reproduce immersion and/or learning environments accurately serving the exact purpose: performance optimization, safety engineering, education, corporate training, scientific modeling, etc.
Virtual Training
Virtual training, also known as virtual maintenance training, is a type of interactive app that allows to greatly immerse a person in the real environment and educational process in order to improve their skills.
Interactive 3D Tour
An interactive 3D tour, also referred to as a virtual tour, is a 3D travel around some simulated location with the full immersion of a person.
CAD Application
CAD application is an interactive application with computer-aided design aiming to create, modify, analyze, or optimize the design of engineering projects. It is used in manufacturing, planning, computer-aided analysis, etc.
Collaborative Platform
Collaborative platform is a type of interactive app that provides an opportunity for virtual collaboration between people in real-time including brainstorming sessions, presentations, business meetings, etc.
Custom Interactive App
Custom interactive app is an application adjusted for specific objectives that allow providing an organic digital experience for users.
Development
The interactive app development process[4] usually includes the following main stages:
- Idea Development and Business Analysis
To allocate a specific app idea, certain brainstorming sessions may be held. Also, such an idea can be found and further developed among the existing app idea listings. The most popular way to create an app idea is to identify some problem and solve it with an application. Once the idea is defined, business analysis helps to calculate its potential popularity and profitability based on market research, business needs identification, and finding solutions per existing problems.
- Technical Documentation
Upon the results of business analysis, tech specification and other important documents are developed. They describe the whole development process, each feature requirement and how everything is connected, and the important notes for the application development and testing.
- UX/UI Design
This stage includes the prototype development, creation of the app mock-ups, and the full user experience and user interface design development. At this step the decisions about the way an application will look like are held. Within this stage, the app design gets polished from simple sketches till the finished layout getting through numerous iterations until there is a satisfactory result.
- Infrastructure and Functionality Development[5]
This is the most important stage where the real application development is held. At this step developers write code using the chosen programming languages, frameworks, and libraries according to the specified tech requirements described in the technical documentation. It also includes the app testing phase where QA engineers check the app quality and its compliance to the tech and design requirements. The whole development process is usually performed according to the agile methodology.
- Filling with Required Content
As interactive apps consist not only with functionality but should present the necessary content to users, the final stage includes filling the application with content.
Platforms
For 2D experience
Interactive apps are compatible with desktop and mobile OSs: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.
For VR experience
Desktop VR interactive apps work properly with WebVR compatible browsers. It involves Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality, HTC Vive, etc. Additionally, users need to have Oculus Desktop App or SteamVR installed.
Interactive apps are compatible with Standalone VR devices such as Oculus Quest or Oculus Go via the Mozilla Firefox Reality Browser or the Oculus Browser.
Mobile VR systems (Samsung Gear, Google Cardboard, etc.) work via the Google Chrome browser.
See Also
References
- ↑ Dan, Asit; Sitaram, Dinkar (2002). A Generalized Interval Caching Policy For Mixed Interactive And Long Video Workloads. pp. 699–706. Search this book on
- ↑ Perkins, Colin; Hardman, Vicky (2002). A Survey of Packet Loss Recovery Techniques for Streaming Audio. pp. 607–615. Search this book on
- ↑ Brambilla, Marco; Fraternali, Piero (2015). Interaction Flow Modeling Language. pp. 25–50. Search this book on
- ↑ Smith, Robert; Morrow, Jeffrey (1999). Product development process modeling. pp. 237–261. Search this book on
- ↑ Solingen, Rini; Rico, David (2006). Quality Software Development. pp. 1–41. Search this book on
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