Beyond the Visible: Transforming AR/VR Software Engineering Through Empirical Discovery, Metamorphic Testing, and Multi-Agent Intelligence

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are reshaping interactive computing, yet software engineering support for immersive applications has not kept pace with their growing complexity. Because AR systems produce outputs that depend on dynamic environments, sensor input, and real-world context, the expected outputs are often impossible to determine in advance -a challenge known as the oracle problem -making conventional testing approaches insufficient. To understand how this affects development in practice, we first conduct an empirical study of 48 core AR developers, identifying recurring challenges across the software development lifecycle, with especially persistent difficulties in testing, bug reproduction, and handling environmental variability. Building on these findings, we introduce a metamorphic testing framework for mobile AR that validates context-dependent behavior through domain- specific behavioral relations rather than fixed expected outputs, and we show that the same oracle-avoiding abstraction extends to LLM-generated code, where property-based testing exposes correctness failures that unit tests miss. We then investigate how LLMs themselves can support correctness reasoning in this setting: first, through a stability-driven evalua- tion framework showing that multi-agent debate improves the reliability of metamorphic relation identification, and then through a repository-aware generation framework that uses hierarchical code context and deliberative refinement to discover new AR-specific relations directly from software repositories. Taken together, this work advances a correctness-oriented foundation for AR software engineering, grounded in developer practice, expressed through behavioral abstractions, and supported by structured LLM-based reasoning.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science & Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and#38; Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Bose, Dibyendu Brinto

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Brown, Dwayne Christian

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Gracanin, Denis
• Meng, Na
• David-John, Brendan Matthew
• Wang, Xiaoyin

• AR development
• Metamorphic testing
• Multi Agent System

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:46154

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/143496