A Generic User Interface Framework for Virtual Reality Applications
Frank Althoff, Tobias Völk, Gregor McGlaun, M. Lang · 2001
Current VRML browser implementations lack the flexibility of adaptable user interfaces and navigation modes, which is in massive contradiction to the primary motivation for using 3D, namely to give the user a more natural understanding of how to interact with computer systems, and, in return, to make computer work more timeefficient. Multimodal interaction, such as the use of gesture and speech recognition, promises further improvement of the usability of 3D applications, but can only be seen in dedicated applications thus far. We present a user interface framework including the definition of a node set and the interfaces to other devices: As a key feature, we propose a DeviceSensor node that allows grabbing arbitrary user input, and a Camera-node to realize arbitrary navigation modes. The interface is based on the formalism of a context-free grammar providing the representation of domain- and device-independent multimodal information contents. 1.