Defining the Semantics of Conceptual Modeling Concepts for 3D Complex Objects in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) allows creating interactive three-dimen sional computer worlds in which objects have a sense of spatial and physical presence and can be manipulated by the user as such. Different software tools have been developed to build virtual worlds. However, most tools require considerable background knowledge about VR and the virtual world needs to be expressed in low-level VR primitives. This is one of the reasons why developing a virtual world is complex, time-consuming and expensive. Introducing a conceptual design phase in the development process will reduce the complexity and provides an abstraction layer to hide the VR implementation details. However, virtual worlds contain features not present in classical software. Therefore, new modeling concepts, currently not available in classical conceptual modeling languages, such as ORM or UML, are required. Next to introducing these new modeling concepts, it is also necessary to define their semantics to ensure unambiguousness and to allow code generation. In this paper, we introduce conceptual modeling concepts to specify complex connected 3D objects. Their semantics are defined using F-logic, a full-fledged logic following the object-oriented paradigm. F-logic will allow applying reasoners to check the consistency of the specifications and to investigate properties before the application is actually built.