3DC PLUS: An Authoring Toolkit for Collaborative Virtual Environments

In recent years, the hardware technology, high bandwidth network and 3D graphics systems have brought the Virtual Reality (VR) technology into a new field: Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) This field’s goal consists of using computers as tools for communication and information share through the use of 3D shared spaces to provide collaboration facilities . Even if, in the same time, also 3D design and virtual environments au-thoring tools has been developed, their main goal is mainly directed to support professional designers in the modeling of 3D words through advanced techniques for shapes and surfaces manipulation allowing multiple ef-fects to improve the rendering of the scene without offer any specific support to more closely related interaction control issues. When creating a virtual reality environments, in fact, a large amount of interactions have to be programmed. The main problem as for this is that non-computer expert users lack the programming skills neces-sary to create useful applications. Specifying interactions and behaviors remains in the domain of the program-mers. This paper examines the problem of creating authoring tools for VE that allow non-expert users to produce effective CVE applications without the direct programmers assistance. Then we propose a toolkit to support the entire process of designing, composing and deploying a Collaborative Virtual Environment in a visual mode based on the WYSIWYG paradigm that WT04 engine can process and evolve. WT04 is a research project to achieve a framework for generating and enjoining 3D collaborative virtual experiences. WT04 framework sup-ports collaborative rules definitions suitable to fully govern virtual experiences: virtual meeting during which users join to virtual session in the same time and in the same virtual environments with the help of a guide ex-plaining the contents and aiding the collaboration between users to achieve same particular goals according to well defined collaboration rules. Hence, main dynamic aspects that govern experiences are environment and ob-jects configuration, content definition and collaboration rules specification applying to each particular session.