From: Pablo Figueroa [pfiguero@cs.ualberta.ca]
Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 2:27 PM
To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: VR Toolkits

Hi Mike,

We designed a library of platform independent 3D ITs that we are now
implementing in MRToolkit [Shaw93]. Our idea is based on several
concepts: virtual devices [Foley74], taxonomies of 3D ITs [Bowman99],
dataflows [Slater96], and object orientation. We're implementing several
3D ITs presented in previous papers to show its generality. In general
terms, an IT is an object composed of reusable pieces, that can be
connected to different devices and that can be changed for other ITs with
the same interface (connections with other ITs and devices). We haven't
published yet (it will be very soon.. ;-> ) but I can give you more
details if you're interested. 

[Bowman99] Bowman, D.; Hodges, L. Formalizing the Design,
Evaluation, and Application of Interaction Techniques
for Immersive Virtual Environments. to Appear in The
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 1999.

[Foley74] Foley, J.; Wallace, V. The Art of Natural Man-Machine
Conversation. In Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol 62. #4. 1974

[Shaw93] Shaw, C.; Green, M.; Liang, J.; Sun, Y. Decoupled
Simulation in Virtual Reality with the MR Toolkit. in
ACM Transactions on Information Systems. Vol. 13,
#3. 1993. pp. 287-317

[Slater96] Steed, A.; Slater, M. A Dataflow Representation for
Defining Behaviours within Virtual Environments. In
Proceedings of VRAIS' 96. pp. 163-167

-------------------------------------------
Pablo Figueroa              pfiguero@cs.ualberta.ca
PhD Student                 http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~pfiguero
University of Alberta

Relax ... God is in charge  
-------------------------------------------


> Hi ...
> 
> I am currently working on creating a generic framework for implementing
> interaction in VR. The idea is to produce a toolkit that developers can use
> to implement interaction in their applications with a minimum of effort! I'm
> sure that much of the VR environment toolkits out there have interaction
> built in to them. I would like to look at the way that each of these
> implements interaction to try and gauge the current methodologies in the
> field. So, if anyone knows of any VR authoring libraries/toolkits that have
> interaction features, could you please give me details about them, or info
> on where I can get more details.
> 
> Thanx
> 
> Mike
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>        " In my dreams, I was drowning my sorrows
>          When my sorrows, they learned to swim   "
>                                       -U2
> Michael Rorke			  mrorke@cs.ru.ac.za
> Computer Science Masters          mike@rucus.ru.ac.za
> Rhodes University, Grahamstown    http://rucus.ru.ac.za/~mike  
>                                   ICQ# 37904228
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 	* Standard ANSI disclaimer *
>