Chasm: Bridging description and implementation of 3d interfaces

2006

Nowadays, software development is evolving exponentially, with the hand of hardware and technological innovations. New languages or paradigms are required to provide solutions to those new technologies. This contributes to frequent changes in focus and as result of new areas of deployment,[Khaz00].

2008

Abstract In our experience, novel ideas for 3D interaction techniques greatly outpace developers' ability to implement them, despite the potential benefit of these ideas. We believe this is due to the inherent implementation complexity of 3D interfaces, without sufficient support from methods and tools. Believing a developer-centric representation could overcome this problem, we investigated developer practices, artifacts and language.

Proceedings of the seventh international …, 2002

Even though numerous Web3D technologies exist, most of them do not support a high-level, multi-disciplinary authoring process. Moreover, concepts of reuse are rarely provided. A componentbased approach is introduced with the CONTIGRA architecture to construct interactive, three-dimensional applications, either stand-alone or web-based. The approach is entirely based on declarative XML documents describing the component implementation, its interface, as well as component configuration and composition of 3D user interfaces and virtual environments. Extensible 3D (X3D) is used as the scene graph basis. However, the resulting applications can be translated to other 3D technologies, too. Another advantage of the approach is reuse both at the implementation level and the higher abstract component level. This paper introduces the overall architecture and the XML schemas used for the component documents. It finally outlines the associated authoring process and tools involved.

Computer-Aided Design of …, 2007

A transformational method for developing tri-dimensional user interfaces of interactive information systems is presented that starts from a task model and a domain model to progressively derive a final user interface. This method con- sists of three steps: deriving one or many abstract user interfaces from a task model and a domain model, deriving one or many concrete user interfaces from each abstract interface, and producing the code of the final user interfaces corresponding to each concrete interface. To ensure the two first steps, trans- formations are encoded as graph transformations performed on the involved models expressed in their graph equivalent. In addition, a graph grammar gathers relevant graph transformations for accomplishing the sub-steps in- volved in each step. Once a concrete user interface is resulting from these two first steps, it is converted in a development environment for 3D user interfaces where it can be edited for fine tuning and personalization. From this environ- ment, the user interface code is automatically generated. The method is de- fined by its steps, input/output, and exemplified on a case study. By expressing the steps of the method through transformations between models, the method adheres to Model-Driven Engineering paradigm where models and transforma- tions are explicitly defined and used.

The construction of 3D graphics applications is tedious work that consumes much more time than conventional 2D graphics applications, requiring, besides, specific knowledge about 3D geometry operations. To alleviate these problems several object-oriented frameworks for 3D graphics application construction have been proposed in the literature. They attempt to provide a generic architecture for building 3D graphics applications, but, in general, they tighten their designs to specific 3D rendering libraries, or they propose ad-hoc abstractions that do not respond to generic design problems. That is, they are not designed following problem-centered design rules that can encourage a better solution in terms of flexibility and adaptability of the solution. With the goal of minimizing these problems, Manifest3D, a framework to develop 3D graphics applications, was developed. The framework design was thoroughly driven by design patterns. This process brings benefits that impact directly on understanding, reuse, evolution, analysis and documentation management of the framework. As a consequence, it makes the instantiation of applications easier by composition of basic behaviors. In this paper, the main design aspects of Manifest3D are presented, as well as several examples of its instantiation to build 3D graphics visualizations.

Extensible 3D (X3D) modeling language is one of the leading Web3D technologies. Despite the rich functionality, the language does not currently provide tools for rapid development of conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Every X3D author is responsible for building---from primitives---a purpose-specific set of required interface components, often for a single use. We address the challenge of creating consistent, efficient, interactive,

… of the eighth international conference on 3D Web …, 2003

Success of 3D applications on the Web inherently depends on object behavior and interaction. Current Web3D formats often fall short in supporting behavior modeling. This paper introduces a flexible concept for declaratively modeling 3D object behaviors. Based on Extensible 3D (X3D) a node concept is suggested with object-oriented features such as inheritance, strong typing, and polymorphism. An XML-based language Behavior3DNode serves the interface definition of new nodes. Their implementation is simplified by automated code generation. A novel grammar generation mechanism collects all existing nodes in a dynamic XML Schema. Thus new behavior nodes can be used along with built-in nodes as first class scene graph elements. A rich set of predefined behaviors is proposed, among them Animation and State Machine node collections. The concepts were successfully implemented with VRML97/X3D and integrated into a 3D component approach.

2015

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '93, 1993

2014

X3D is an open, royalty-free, scene-graph-based standard for 3D virtual worlds that has been used by virtual environment developers many times until today. As a virtual environment development tool, it has numerous appealing features; however, it also has certain characteristics that may, under certain circumstances, create significant problems to developers. With a motivation to communicate our own experience to, and contribute to the efforts of, other researchers who are using or consider using it, we evaluate X3D in a virtual environment developer's perspective and identify potential problems with its usage. Also, we present an architectural pattern aimed at addressing those problems effectively, with a focus on transparency, standards-compliance, reusability and extendibility. In conclusion, we present a case study of the application of the proposed pattern in a fully-implemented intelligent virtual environment system.