What is it about?
VReqST (Virtual Reality Requirement Specification Tool) is an innovative tool designed to streamline the way Virtual Reality (VR) products are conceptualized and developed. Traditionally, requirement engineering for VR has been fragmented and poorly structured, relying on ad-hoc documents that often lack traceability between user needs and design decisions. VReqST solves this by offering a model-based, template-driven framework specifically tailored for VR software. The tool provides structured modules like scene.json, article.json, action-response.json, and timeline.json that help requirement analysts formally define 3D environments, objects, user interactions, and behavioral flows. Whether you're building a VR maze game, a training simulator, or a medical rehab experience, VReqST enables clear, traceable, and updatable requirements that map directly to design elements. What sets VReqST apart is its emphasis on design traceability and versioning—a single change in a requirement can automatically reflect in the prototype, making it highly suitable for agile and iterative VR development. It is a foundational step towards bringing discipline and structure to the creative chaos of immersive software design.
Featured Image
Photo by Laurens Derks on Unsplash
Why is it important?
As Virtual Reality (VR) technologies advance rapidly, there is a growing gap between creative VR design and rigorous engineering discipline. Traditional requirement engineering methods—designed for web, mobile, or desktop software—fail to capture the spatial, sensory, and interactive complexities of immersive VR applications. VReqST fills this critical void by offering a formalized, VR-first requirement specification tool, allowing designers, developers, and stakeholders to collaborate using a shared, structured language. It enables clear modeling of scenes, objects, interactions, and system responses—areas where ambiguity can otherwise lead to broken experiences or costly redesigns. This tool is particularly vital for iterative development and version control. VR products are often exploratory in nature, requiring frequent tweaks in both design and user interaction. VReqST allows teams to propagate requirement changes systematically across design and prototype layers—reducing rework and enhancing traceability and accountability throughout the VR product lifecycle. In academic and industry contexts alike, VReqST is a major step toward standardizing the design of immersive systems, making VR software more maintainable, testable, and scalable. For organizations embracing XR technologies, VReqST isn't just helpful—it’s essential for building serious, production-grade VR applications.
Perspectives
The VReqST paper introduces a domain-specific requirement specification tool tailored for the complexities of VR systems—something that general software engineering methods often overlook. It offers a structured way to model interactions, scenes, and user responses, making it invaluable for designing immersive, traceable, and testable VR experiences. For researchers tackling challenges like design versioning, interaction modeling, or agile VR prototyping, this paper provides both theoretical foundations and practical frameworks. It bridges the long-standing gap between creative design and engineering discipline in VR product development, opening up avenues for more repeatable and scalable research workflows.
Dr. Sai Anirudh Karre
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: VReqST: A Requirement Specification Tool for Virtual Reality Software Products, April 2025, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/icse-companion66252.2025.00012.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
