Rapid Development of Virtual Environments: A systematic approach for interactive design of 3D graphics

Abstract

It has long been a bottleneck for VE popularity that the development of VE normally acquires heavy time, labour and monetary investment. Although so-called high-level, abstracted graphical libraries which have been delivered by third parties based on industrial standard like OpenGL speed up the VE development to certain extent, the involved engineering process which largely relies on the system computing approach is by all means not developer-oriented but application-specific, thus it remains technically difficult and expensive to create VE application from scratch. This research attempts to propose an ultimate solution for VE rapid development by exploring the boundary between system programming, interpretative computing, interfaces wrapping, abstracted scene-graph libraries, grouping and database technology. The convergence of ideas from these technological fields has formed a systematic approach by which developers are encouraged to design and implement 3D interactive graphics via making necessary reconfiguration to both graphical content and rendering context take place at system runtime. The whole development cycle of VE application can be further accelerated by using similar existing drawings from the database as reconfigurable VE templates. In this way, the developers can avoid creating graphical application completely from scratch by making runtime changes to retrieved VE template in terms of its rendered graphics, user interfaces and related functional modules.