Conceptual Modeling of Object Behavior in a Virtual Environment

Today, the design of a Virtual Reality (VR) application is still a specialized and time consuming task. Many techniques and software tools have been created to facilitate the development process. However, they all require considerable knowledge of VR technology. Furthermore, modeling the behaviors of the objects in a Virtual Environment requires programming skills. For this reason, we have developed an approach called "VR-WISE" that allows specifying a VR application at a conceptual level, free from any implementation details, and from the viewpoint of a domain expert, allowing non-VR experts to participate in the design of a Virtual Environment. This approach uses ontologies, incorporating domain knowledge, and high-level modeling concepts for describing the Virtual Environment. In this paper, we explain how object-behavior in a Virtual Environment can be described at a conceptual level. We show how simple behaviors can be combined for composing more complex behaviors. We illustrate the different modeling concepts by means of examples.