The Design of Narrative Virtual Environments

Abstract

The hardware technology for the production of virtual environments (VE) has been available for at least five years, but very few software tools have been developed for this new technology. Existing software tools are very low level, forcing the application developer to use programming to produce most of the application code. Many VE applications will be developed by non-programmers, who don’t have the skill or time to use today’s low level tools. The development of high level tools has been hindered by the lack of models and specification techniques for these user interfaces. Since this interaction style is quite new, its not surprising that these models and techniques haven’t been developed. Now that we have some experience with the development of VE applications, its time to start considering the formal basis of this interaction style.

This paper presents our initial attempt at developing a formal model for narrative virtual environments, and the specification techniques that go along with this model. The model and specification techniques that we have developed form the basis for a set of software tools that can be used by non-programmers to produce narrative virtual environments.