The ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing recently held it’s 34th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) at Limassol, Cyprus. Part-Time PhD student Sai Anirudh Karre who is working under Prof. Y. Raghu Reddy presented his paper in the “software engineering” technical track of the main conference.
Towards VR Practices
Tracing his journey towards virtual reality applications, 29-year-old Sai Anirudh says that he first worked in Software Quality Engineering under Prof. Y. Raghu Reddy as part of his MS by Research (part-time) programme. After completing his MS, he signed up for a part-time PhD programme in 2017. “As part of my Ph.D. Research, I gained some interest in Usability in day-to-day Software. I started working on Mobile Usability Issues, Web-based Usability and settled with Virtual Reality application,” he says. Juggling work (he is a Principal Engineer at SkillSoft Inc) with part-time research, Sai Anirudh spent a year and a half conducting an Empirical Research on understanding current practices of VR Product Teams. This year, he published a paper titled – Is Virtual Reality Product Development different?: An Empirical Study on VR Product Development Practices which he presented at ISEC (Innovations in Software Engineering Conference) 2019, in Pune.
Usability of VR Products
“Based on the insights from the empirical study, I started focusing on Usability in virtual reality products. I conducted a comprehensive Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on usability challenges in virtual reality products and published SLR paper in SAC 2019 titled Usability evaluation of VR products in the industry: a systematic literature review’, he says. Attributing insightful results obtained from his research work to his co-investigator, Neeraj Mathur, Sai Anirudh says that Neeraj helped in the analysis of data.
The Conference
Sai Anirudh received partial funding from Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) to travel and present the paper at the conference. Terming the SAC 2019 as a vibrant conference with over 2500 participants in all streams of Computer Science from across the globe, Sai Anirudh says that he met researchers from different universities. “I got an opportunity to exchange ideas about my research problem. Based on the feedback from other fellow researchers, I am now able to formulate the big picture of my Ph.D. problem and progress further”. According to Prof. Raghu Reddy, Head of SERC, “It’s important for students to be able to travel and network with fellow researchers and talk to each other about their research work. Sai Anirudh’s work lies in the area of “Process engineering for VR product development”. There aren’t too many researchers in the world working in this space and it’s nice to see his work being accepted by the peer community”.