From: owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu on behalf of Anthony STEED
[A.Steed@cs.ucl.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 7:54 AM
To: Pablo Figueroa
Cc: Doug Bowman; 3dui List; Rex Hartson
Subject: Re: notation for 3D interaction techniques



From: Pablo Figueroa <pfiguero@cs.ualberta.ca>
> I'm working on a high level language for interaction techniques (IT) as
> part of my PhD. Its main characteristics are:
> - It is independendent of any implementation language (i.e. VRML, C++,
> Java), but it can be implemented in any of them.
> - It defines the interface of each IT and how they can collaborate with
> others in an application, so it is possible to describe composition of
> ITs.


Following on from Pablo's suggestion there have been several attempts
at data flow descriptions of immersive interaction techniques:

  - BodyElectric from VPL. Difficult to find details about, best to
    refer to patent #US5588139, and short description in Kalawsky's
    book. Apparently Jaron Lanier still supports some users
    (www.well.com/user/jaron/vpl.html)

  - My own VEDA system a vrml97 like language specifically for
    immersive interface design (un-touched for 4 years). Included a 3D
    representation of the data flow for real-time reconfiguration
    when you had the helmet on.
    A. Steed and M. Slater, "A dataflow representation for defining
    interaction within immersive virtual environments", Proceedings of
    VRAIS 96, 

  - The Carmel system used a 2D VRML97 dataflow editor and applied it to 
    the description of immersive interaction. The software developed
    by Virtuality and University of Delft was never widely available
    and details are sparse, but Chris Hand had a paper with some
    details of it in the VRML'97 symposium. Do any working systems
    still exist?
    Edwards, J and Hand, C. "MaPS: Movement and Planning Support for
    Navigation in an Immersive VRML Browser". Proceedings of The
    Second Symposium on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language
    (VRML'97)

<much interesting stuff deleted>

I would be very interested to hear how other people program their
interaction techniques, as well as how to model them abstractly. We
program most of ours using plugins to the DIVE vr system, but I did
have a student programming techniques using DIVE/tcl so we could more
rapidly prototype. This was valuable when setting ranges and functions
for our implementation of the go-go hand technique!


Anthony


-----------------------------------------------------------
Dr Anthony Steed                       A.Steed@cs.ucl.ac.uk