A Tool Supporting Model Based User Interface Design in 3D Virtual Enviroments

Although interactive virtual environments (IVE) have the capability to offer intuitive and easy to use interfaces, their creation is often a long and expensive process, in which specialists play a key role. The VR-DeMo approach investigates how the use of high-level specifications may help to overcome this problem: instead of coding an IVE using a low level programming language, high-level models are used. As such a model-based process combines a series of models containing a mixture of manual and automatic processes. The usefulness of a model based process relies on available tool support. Supporting the VR-DeMo process, this paper introduces CoGenIVE. This tool has been used in order to develop a series of demonstrators, all based on reallife cases in different domains. From this experience, the VR-DeMo approach and more particular CoGenIVE have proven to be useful to develop interactive virtual environments using high-level specifications.