Design Task in Virtual Environments Development

The use of Inhabited Virtual Environments (IVEs), is growing very quickly and people demand easier and more believable ways to interact in these new sites [3] [4], [5], [10], [13]. We understand by IVE a special kind of 3D virtual environments inhabited by avatars, which are the representation either of real humans users of the IVE or autonomous agents. From the point of view of software engineering, IVEs can be seen as a special kind of software systems. In this sense, they must be analyzed, designed, implemented, etc., as any other software system. However, IVEs development requires special tasks and techniques, which are not provided by traditional software engineering methodologies. The question we would like to address in our research is: define the products to be developed during the construction of an IVE and how to manage that development. In addressing this question it is necessary to define a set of steps which will provide a well-defined IVEs development process. In this paper we focus on IVEs design, detailing the tasks needed to complete such design.