Proposal of Generating and Customizing Method to Construct 3D GUI for SCADA

Abstract

Recently, high-quality 3D graphics has become available at a low cost. A number of attempts to visualize information of a very large system by using 3D graphics. Although development of a 3D graphical user interface (3D-GUI) systems, however, usually needs cost more than that of a 2D graphical user interface (2D-GUI) system. To improve this problem, some programming libraries have been developed for 3D-GUI. But they require developers to write lines of source code after understanding many kinds of API to construct 3D-GUI systems. In this paper, we propose an effective method called "3D Generating & Customizing Method (3D-GCM)" to construct 3D-GUIs easily for SCADA. We have already proposed 2D-GUI constructing method 2D-GCM, 2D Constructing & Customizing Method to help developpers build 2D-GUI system easily. It is used in actual fields such as SCADA. It is cosisted mainly two steps to construct 2D-GUI. First, default 2D-GUI is automatically generated from data and functions included in an application program(AP). Then, the default 2D-GUI is customized interactively while running the AP to get final 2D-GUI. 3D-GCM consists of two similar steps to 2D-GCM to construct 3D-GUI. First, default 3D-GUI which is previously decided is generated from an existing 2D-GUI. Then, default 3D-GUI is customized interactively while running the AP to get final 3D-GUI. Relationship between 3D-GUI and the AP data to display or to control is kept the same as that between 2D-GUI and the AP data even while 3D-GUI is being customized. This method allows AP developers to construct 3D-GUI using existing 2D-GUI without knowledge of 3D-GUI programming. It also allows end-users to customize 3D-GUI flexibly while running the AP. To implement this method, we have developed a C++ class library called GhostHouse. In order to realize flexible customization while keeping the relationship between 3D-GUI and SCADA taget data, we introduced two classes called Model-Ghost and View-Ghost into GhostHouse. Model-Ghost manages AP data, while View-Ghost manages 3D-GUI parts. These Ghosts realize interactions between a 3D-GUI and AP data. Since references between View-Ghost and Model-Ghost are implemented by a link object uses consistent communication protocol, references between View-Ghost and Model-Ghost can be kept even when a 3D-GUI part is replaced with another part. 3D-GUI can be customized easily since it is not necessary to