Modeling dynamic aspects in virtual interactive environments

Abstract

Virtual 3D environments are found in a wide range of applications, like entertainment software, industrial simulations and virtual reality in medical imaging. Modern graphics hardware supports real-time rendering of highly complex virtual worlds; at the same time, extensive interaction capabilities are required to make an application useful. Graphical scenes are commonly composed of many reusable and recurring elements in a well-defined hierarchical way. In this work, a similar approach is proposed for modeling interaction capabilities. Comparable to the elements of a graphical scene, interaction mechanisms often consist of multiple components. By modeling these components as reusable objects, complex interaction mechanisms can easily be realized. The usefulness of this method is demonstrated in an application for visualizing 3D medical data, in which it has been applied to design both the 3D user interface and several interactive tools for manipulating medical datasets.