A toolkit for developing multi-user, distributed virtual environments

Codella, C.; Jalili, R.; Koved, Lawrence; Lewis, J. Bryan

doi:10.1109/vrais.1993.380752

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The DIVE framework [10] follows these requirements and already demonstrated its capability to develop VR software systems for more than 10 years. Similar to DIVE, the VR-DECK Toolkit [2] is a development environment consisting of C++ class libraries for module construction, interprocess communication, device support, and hierarchical object-oriented graphics. It allows its users to create virtual environments using a mixed object-oriented and event-based paradigm for defining system behavior.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Model Driven Engineering meets virtual reality: Feedback from application to the Collaviz framework

Duval

Blouin

Jézéquel

2014

2014 IEEE 7th Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the increasing use of 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (3D CVE), their development is still a cumbersome task. The various concerns to consider (distributed system, 3D graphics, etc.) complexify the development as well as the evolution of CVEs. Software engineering recently proposed methods and tools to ease the development process of complex software systems. Among them, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) considers models as first-class entities. A model is an abstraction of a specific aspect of the system under study for a specific purpose. MDE thus breaks down a complex system into as many models for different purposes, such as: generating code from models; building domain specific programming/modeling languages (DSL); generating tools such as graphical or textual editors. In this paper we leverage MDE for developing 3D CVEs. We show how the Collaviz framework took benefits from a DSL we built. The benefits are multiple: 3D CVE designers can focus on the behavior of their virtual objects without bothering with distributed and graphics features; configuring the content of 3D CVEs and their deployment on various software and hardware platforms can be automated through code generation. We detail the development process we propose and the experiments we conducted on Collaviz .

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Model Driven Engineering meets virtual reality: Feedback from application to the Collaviz framework

Duval

Blouin

Jézéquel

2014

2014 IEEE 7th Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, performance shortfalls of the system have led to its discontinued use. Another such system is VR-DECK (Codella et al, 1993), which provides for events to be passed between software components that may be distributed about a network. A VE application is defined by a set of components and their event connections.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Simple Virtual Environment Library: An Extensible Framework for Building VE Applications

Kessler

Bowman

Hodges

2000

Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As virtual environment (VE) technology becomes accessible to (and affordable for) an ever-widening audience of users, the demand for VE applications will increase. Tools that assist and facilitate the development of these applications, therefore, will also be in demand. To support our efforts in quickly designing and implementing VE applications, we have developed the Simple Virtual Environment (SVE) library. In this article, we describe the characteristics of the library that support the development of both simple and complex VE applications. Simple applications are created by novice programmers or for rapid prototyping. More-complex applications incorporate new user input and output devices, as well as new techniques for user interaction, rendering, or animation. The SVE library provides more-comprehensive support for developing new VE applications and better supports the various device configurations of VE applications than current systems for 3-D graphical applications. The development of simple VE applications is supported through provided default interaction, rendering, and user input and output device handling. The library's framework includes an execution framework that provides structure for incrementally adding complexity to selected tasks of an application, and an environment model that provides a layer of abstraction between the application and the device configuration actually used at runtime. This design supports rapid development of VE applications through incremental development, code reuse, and independence from hardware resources during the development. IntroductionThe development of VE applications is an area inviting experimentation. In particular, the field is open to new applications, different device configurations, new techniques for rendering, interaction, and model maintenance. Such experimentation is most productive when new ideas and designs can be implemented quickly and then compared to previous implementations. However, developing even simple VE applications with limited or no software support requires a considerable amount of expertise and development time. In addition, it is quite difficult to reuse modules of VE applications in projects that use different configurations.To support the rapid development of novel VE applications that may introduce new environments, behaviors, or software techniques, we have developed

show abstract

“…VR-DECK [10] allows multiple users on a set of homogeneous workstations to share a single simulation and cannot be easily extended to support heterogeneous workstations. Message traffic is reduced by sending events only to machines known to be interested in them.…”

Section: Distributed Ve Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language-level support for exploratory programming of distributed virtual environments

MacIntyre

Feiner

1996

Proceedings of the 9th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology - UIST '96

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We describe COTERIE, a toolkit that provides languagelevel support for building distributed virtual environments. COTERIE is based on the distributed data-object paradigm for distributed shared memory. Any data object in COTE-RIE can be declared to be a Shared Object that is replicated fully in any process that is interested in it. These Shared Objects support asynchronous data propagation with atomic serializable updates, and asynchronous notification of updates. COTERIE is built in Modula-3 and uses existing Modula-3 packages that support an integrated interpreted language, multithreading, and 3D animation. Unlike other VE toolkits, COTERIE is based on a set of general-purpose parallel and distributed language concepts designed with the needs of virtual environments in mind. We summarize the requirements that we identified for COTERIE, describe its implementation, compare it with other toolkits, and provide examples that show COTERIE's advantages.

show abstract

A toolkit for developing multi-user, distributed virtual environments

Cited by 24 publications

References 6 publications

When Model Driven Engineering meets virtual reality: Feedback from application to the Collaviz framework

When Model Driven Engineering meets virtual reality: Feedback from application to the Collaviz framework

The Simple Virtual Environment Library: An Extensible Framework for Building VE Applications

Language-level support for exploratory programming of distributed virtual environments

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About