VR Development with InTml
Pablo Figueroa · Virtual Reality · 2010
Virtual RealityOur long term goal is to facilitate VR and Mixed Reality (MR) development, by dividing its complexity among several people with different roles.For this reason we created the Interaction Techniques Markup Language (InTml) and a set of tools around this concept.InTml allows us to divide concerns in two main categories, one directed to architectural design, and the other related to code; one high level abstraction, and the other low level implementation.InTml offers an abstraction for the description of VR applications, independent from a particular set of device drivers, VR toolkits, libraries, and programming languages; an abstraction powerful enough to describe a wide variety of applications in the VR domain.This could make VR applications more portable in the future, since their abstract description in InTml may be ported to several technologies.Finally, InTml makes easier to identify particular devices and interaction techniques in an application, so they can be replaced if it is important to port an application to a new hardware environment.We call this process application retargeting, and we hope that in the future it will be an important element of VR application maintenance and evolution.This chapter is organized as follows: First, we present some introductory examples and several relevant aspects in InTml development.Next, our development process and variability factors are presented.Later we present more examples of use and relevant related work.Finally, we describe future work.