Experiences in Designing a User-Oriented Tool for Building and Understanding Interactions in Virtual Environments

100-150 words) Designing a virtual environment and its interactions is a difficult task because of the complexity of specifying non-deterministic relationships between multiple objects. We present a system to help novice designers create interactions in a virtual environment. Our system uses triggersets (event-condition-action triads) for entering interactions. It provides multiple visualizations of the virtual environment and its interactions: a sequence diagram for narrative sequencing, a floorplan for spatial sequencing and a timeline for time sequencing. We conducted an exploratory study with 11 subjects, where some received visualizations and triggersets of a VE and others only received the triggersets. The study had two parts: to assess whether subjects could sequence triggersets accurately and to assess how they managed to debug mistakes in a different set of triggersets. The visualization group described 72.5% of the sequence correct on average, compared to 56.4% by the non-visualization group. For debugging, the visualization group detected more than twice as many errors as the non-visualization group.