Rapid Prototyping for the Design of Virtual Worlds

Development of Virtual Reality (VR) applications is challenging where application developers are required to have expertise in the target VR technologies along with the problem domain expertise. New VR technologies impose a significant learning curve to even the most experienced VR developer. The proposed solution relies on synthesis to automate the migration of a VR application to a new unfamiliar VR platform/technology. To solve the problem, the Common Scene Definition Framework (CSDF) was developed, that serves as a superset/model representation of the target virtual world. Input modules were developed to populate the framework with the capabilities of the virtual world imported from VRML 2.0 and X3D formats. The synthesis capability was built into the framework to synthesize the virtual world into a subset of VRML 2.0, VRML 1.0, X3D and Java3D platforms. Interfaces were designed to keep the framework extensible to different and new VR formats/technologies. The framework demonstrated the ability to quickly synthesize a working prototype of the input virtual world in the different VR formats.