Abstract
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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Second Life, http://www.secondlife.com/
Fowler, M., Kendall, S.: UML Distilled: a brief introduction to the standard object modeling language. Addison-Wesley Professional, London (1999)
Halpin, T.: Conceptual Schema and Relational Database Design. WytLytPub (1999)
Halpin, T.: Information Modeling and Relational Databases: From Conceptual Analysis to Logical Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2001)
Bille, W.: Conceptual Modeling of Complex Objects for Virtual Environments, A Formal Approach. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium (2007)
Bille, W., De Troyer, O., Kleinermann, F., Pellens, B., Romero, R.: Using Ontologies to Build Virtual Worlds for the Web. In: Proc. of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2004 (ICWI 2004), Madrid, Spain, pp. 683–689. IADIS Press (2004)
De Troyer, O., Bille, W., Romero, R., Stuer, P.: On Generating Virtual Worlds from Domain Ontologies. In: Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Multi-Media Modeling, pp. 279–294 (2003)
De Troyer, O., Kleinermann, F., Pellens, B., Bille, W.: Conceptual Modeling for Virtual Reality. In: Tutorials, Posters, Panels, and Industrial Contributions of the 26th international Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2007), CRPIT, Auckland, New Zealand, pp. 5–20 (2007)
Kleinermann, F., De Troyer, O., Mansouri, H., Romero, R., Pellens, B., Bille, W.: Designing Semantic Virtual Reality Applications. In: Proc. of the 2nd INTUITION International Workshop, pp. 5–10 (2005)
Vince, J.: Introduction to Virtual Reality. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Burdea, G., Coiffet, P.: Virtual Reality Technology. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2003)
Activeworlds, http://www.activewords.com
Unreal, http://www.unreal.com/
Hartman, J., Wernecke, J.: The VRML 2.0 Handbook. Addison Wesley, London (1998)
Web 3D Consortium, http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/
Selman, D.: Java3D Programming. Manning (2002)
Octaga, http://www.octaga.com
Vivaty, http://www.vivaty.com/
Kelly, L.: Murdock, 3ds max 5 bible. Wiley Publishing, Chichester (2003)
Derakhshami, D.: Introducing Maya 2008. AutoDesk Maya Press (2008)
Milkshape, http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch
AC3D, http://www.invis.com/
Roosendaal, T., Selleri, S.: The official Blender 2.3 Guide: Free 3D creation suite for Modeling, Animation and rendering. No Starch Press (2005)
X3D Toolkit, http://artis.imag.fr/Software/x3D/
Xj3D, http://www.xj3d.org
Chen, P.: The Entity-Relationship Model: Towards a Unified View of Data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 1(1), 471–522 (1981)
Pellens, B.: A Conceptual Modelling Approach for Behaviour in Virtual Environments using a Graphical Notation and Generative Design Patterns. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium (2007)
Pellens, B., De Troyer, O., Bille, W., Kleinermann, F.: Conceptual modeling of object behavior in a virtual environment. In: Proceedings of Virtual Concept, pp. 93–94 (2005)
Pellens, B., De Troyer, O., Bille, W., Kleinermann, F., Romero, R.: An ontology-driven approach for modeling behavior in Virtual Environments. In: Meersman, R., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Ontology Mining and Engineering and its use for Virtual Reality, pp. 1215–1224. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Pellens, B., Kleinermann, F., De Troyer, O., Bille, W.: Model-based design of virtual environment behavior. In: Zha, H., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Virtual Reality Systems and Multimedia, pp. 29–39. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Pellens, B., De Troyer, O., Kleinermann, F., Bille, W.: Conceptual modeling of behavior in a virtual environment. International Journal of Product and Development, Inderscience Enterprises, 14–18 (2006)
Pellens, B., Kleinermann, F., De Troyer, O.: Intuitively Specifying Object Dynamics in Virtual Environments using VR-WISE. In: Proc. of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, pp. 334–337. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Ontoprise GmbH.: How to write F-Logic Programs covering OntoBroker version 4.3 (2006)
May, W.: How to Write F-Logic Programs in Florida. Institut fur Informatik. Universitat Freiburg, Germany (2006), http://dbis.informatik.uni-freiburg.de
ODE, http://www.ode.org/
MotionWork, http://www.motionworks.com.au/
Kim, G.J., Kang, K.C., Kim, H.: Software engineering of virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual Reality and Technology, pp. 131–138. ACM Press, New York (1998)
Wachsmuth, I., Jung, B.: Dynamic conceptualization in a mechanical-object assembly environment. Artificial Intelligence Review 10(3-4), 345–368 (1996)
Jung, B., Hoffhenke, M., Wachsmuth, I.: Virtual assembly with construction kits. In: Proceedings of ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, pp. 150–160 (1997)
Jung, B., Wachsmuth, I.: Integration of geometric and conceptual reasoning for interacting with virtual environments. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Multimodal Reasoning, pp. 22–27 (1998)
Rachuri, S., Han, Y.-H., Foufou, S., Feng, S.C., Roy, J., Wang, F., Sriram, R.D., Lyons, K.W.: A model for capturing product assembly information. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 6(1), 11–21 (2006)
Fenves, S.: A core product model for representing design information. Technical report NISTIR 6736, National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST (2001)
Jayaram, S., Connacher, H., Lyons, K.: Virtual assembly using virtual reality techniques. Journal of Computer-Aided Design 29(8), 155–175 (1997)
Jayaram, S., Wang, Y., Jayaram, U., Lyons, K., Hart, P.: A virtual assembly design environment. In: Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality Conference, pp. 172–180 (1999)
Smith, G., Stuerzlinger, W.: Integration of constraints into a vr environment. In: Proceedings of the Virtual Reality International Conference, pp. 103–110 (2001)
Gosele, M., Stuerzlinger, W.: Semantic constraint for scene manipulation. In: Proceedings of the Spring Conference in Computer Graphics, pp. 140–146 (2002)
Stuerzlinger, W., Graham, S.: Efficient manipulation of object groups in virtual environments. In: Proceeding of the VR 2002 (2002)
Brutzman, D., Daly, L.: X3D: Extensible 3D graphics for Web Authors. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2007)
Arnaud, R., Brnes, M.: Collada: Sailing the gulf of 3d digital content creation. A K Peters, Ltd., Massachusetts (2006)
SimMechanics, http://www.mathworks.com
SolidWorks, http://www.solidworks.com
Coninx, K., De Troyer, O., Raymaekers, C., Kleinermann, F.: VR-DeMo: a Tool-supported Approach Facilitating Flexible Development of Virtual Environments using Conceptual Modelling. In: Proc. of Virtual Concept, pp. 65–80 (2006)
Mansouri, H., Kleinermann, F., De Troyer, O.: Detecting Inconsistencies in the Design of Virtual Environments over the Web using Domain Specific Rules. In: Proc. of the 14th International Symposium on 3D Web Technology (Web3D 2009), pp. 31–38. ACM Press, New York (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
De Troyer, O., Bille, W., Kleinermann, F. (2009). Defining the Semantics of Conceptual Modeling Concepts for 3D Complex Objects in Virtual Reality. In: Spaccapietra, S., Delcambre, L. (eds) Journal on Data Semantics XIV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5880. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10562-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10562-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10561-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10562-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)