Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2: A user sitting at the VWDB prototype
attached to the top of a user's head to capture the direction of the user's head as
well as to detect the user's or the avatar's position when processing location-sensitive
queries and updates. These devices enable a user to walk through the virtual world
as if he/she were in the real world. In addition to wearing the HMD and sensor
and using the mouse, the user wears a data glove (Figure 2-4) on his/her right
hand and a headset on his/her head (Figure 2-5). The headset is connected to
DS200, a voice recognition system from Speech Systems Inc. that processes a voice
input based on the sentence pattern analysis method. These devices are necessary
for measuring and recognizing the user's gestures and voice, and they ultimately
allow the user to update and query the virtual world and its objects in a multi-
modal manner.
Figure 3 shows a snapshot of a screen image of the VWDB prototype under
development at Ochanomizu University. A virtual office with database function is
prototyped. Users can become immersed in the virtual office, where the user's
right hand is seen as his/her avatar. In the virtual office, it is possible, by means of
multimodal interactions, to move chairs and tables. A more detailed discussion of
this is given in Section 4. Notice that, in the VWDB, a change in the virtual world
is immediately reflected in the backend database, which is managed by Object
Store, a commercial object-oriented database management system.
3
The VWDB Schema Definition Language: An Overview
3.1
Design Principles
To define and create a VWDB database, a schema definition language is necessary
for VWDB enterprise administrators. We call it the VWDB Schema Definition
