Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
In our survey of the different implementations
of existing commercial and academic CVE, we
realized that only a few of them addressed properly
the major issues in developing and deploying their
Collaborative VE platforms.
Our main considerations were:
Almost all of them were applications, rather
than flexible frameworks: they required exten-
sive reprogramming for being used in different
situations and for different purposes, being also
inherently oriented towards code construction
in a code-centred fashion. We wanted, instead,
to create a “format” that could be used over and
over, designing our application in a declarative
way using simple authoring tools, thus using a
document-centred approach since the environ-
ment can be automatically generated from this
declarative descriptions.
The authoring tools they provide are often
limited to each particular web-3D format. So
most of the 3D scenes generated are mainly
monolithic and restricted with regard to both
content and programming code reuse. Furthermore
poor or no support was give to the collaborative
behavior design and the interaction control as a
means to stimulate certain kinds of cooperation
among users.
This applications try to reach a sense of virtual
presence as a fundamental requirement through
a lifelike representation of the entire rendered
scene, despite really making the whole interactive
session simply configurable in order to allow non-
expert users to easily define, besides the world
and avatar's appearance, also collaboration rules,
allowing interactions and, more generally, to
delineate how the actions can take place through
the composition of action and events to arouse
the sense of virtual.
deeply coupled. Furthermore, this development
process made it necessary for the programmers to
learn 3D Studio Max, with waste of time, additional
costs and a little confusion about the competences
required by the different actors.
This time-expensive and deeply involved de-
velopment process forced us to reduce to a mini-
mum all changes and fine tuning improvements
that were needed during the testing and, even if a
little bit of user personalization was made (avatar's
name, html static links, etc.) it was always going
to be tricky to be really effective.
Learning@Europe, the next academic research
project in which we were involved, was sponsored
by
Accenture Foundations
(as part of the Accenture
Corporate Citizenship investment programme)
and executed in cooperation with Fondazione
Italiana Accenture; it was aimed at European high
school students dealing with European history.
Because of the overall high number of par-
ticipants expected (in the first test phase of the
project more than 1000 students, from six different
European countries, took part to the experience)
and above all because of the need to personalize
each session's contents (such as images, movies,
questions, objects) and interaction rules (i.e. the
ability to chat to each other or to move some ob-
ject) depending on specific users participating and
the particular topic given to the session, we had
to devise a different, more flexible, approach to
the generation of collaborative 3D environments
which could grant:
•
A greater easiness of configuration both
of the virtual environment settings and the
collaboration issues
•
A faster session prototype process also tak-
ing into account that, though a lot of the
session is very similar, sharing the main
common features, there are however a lot
of differences due especially to the differ-
ent citizenships of the users, thus causing:
different skins of the avatars, different im-
ages of the place they are from to be loaded
motivations
The main disadvantage of the WebTalkCube
project was (as in WebTalk-I) that the authoring
and software development processes were still too
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