#FIVE : High-level components for developing collaborative and interactive virtual environments

Abstract

This paper presents #FIVE (Framework for Interactive Virtual Environments), a framework for the development of interactive and collaborative virtual environments. #FIVE has been developed to answer the need for an easier and a faster conception and development of virtual reality applications. It has been designed with a constant focus on re-usability with as few hypothesis as possible on the final application in which it could be used. Whatever the chosen implementation for the Virtual Environment (VE), #FIVE : (1) provides a toolkit that eases the declaration of possible actions and behaviours of objects in the VE, (2) provides a toolkit that facilitates the setting and the management of collaborative interactions in a VE, (3) is compliant with distribution of the VE on different setups and (4) proposes guidelines to efficiently create a collaborative and interactive VE. It is composed of several modules, among them, two core modules : the relation engine and the collaborative interaction engine. On the one hand, the relation engine manages the relations between the objects of the environment. On the other hand, the collaborative interaction engine manages how users can collaboratively control objects. The modules that compose the #FIVE framework can be used either independently or simultaneously, depending on the requirements of the application. They can also communicate and work with other modules thanks to an API. For instance, a scenario engine can be plugged to any or both of the #FIVE modules if the application is scenario-based. #FIVE is a work in progress, new core modules will later be proposed. Nevertheless, it has already been used in some VR applications by several persons in our lab. The feedbacks we obtained are rather positive and we intent to further develop #FIVE with additional functionalities, notably by extending it to the control of avatars whether they are controlled by a user or by the system.

ConVRgence (VRIC) Virtual Reality International Conference Proceedings

“…In order to alleviate this content authoring issue, the models in literature allow defining a language that will specify entity features in the VR scenes, as well as possible interactions users can carry out. Several approaches exist: either UML-based (Querrec et al, 2013;Martínez, et al, 2014;Bouville et al, 2015 ;Richard et al, 2018) or ontology-based (Barot, 2014;Hervás et al, 2010;Havard et al, 2017). UML-based approaches are powerful since they use a standardized formalism used by many tools.…”

Action Sequencing in VR, a No-Code Approach

“…The approach in itself is not dependent from any given model, as it only defines a metaphor for the creation of the scenario. However, to implement it in our tool, we choose to base the interactions on #FIVE [4], and the scenarios on #SEVEN [9]. The main advantage of both models is that they are designed to be as versatile as possible, which allows us to create a tool usable for a large range of domains.…”

A Unified Design & Development Framework for Mixed Interactive Systems

“…• a Petri net editor. Our plugin integrates this editor to Unity (Bouville et al, 2015) (Claude et al, 2015). Developers easily complete a pre-defined Petri net by connecting the scene graph entities and their components to it.…”