CoGenIVE: Building 3D Virtual Environments Using a Model Based User Interface Design Approach

Although interactive virtual environments (IVE) have the capability to offer intuitive and easy to use interfaces, their creation is often a long and expensive process, in which specialists play a key role. The VR-DeMo approach investigates how the use of high-level specifications may help to overcome this problem: instead of coding an IVE using a low level programming language, high-level models are used. As such, a model-based process combines a series of models containing a mixture of manual and automatic processes. The usefulness of a model based process relies on available tool support. Supporting the VR-DeMo process, this article introduces CoGenIVE. This tool has been used in order to develop a series of demonstrators, all based on real-life cases in different domains. From this experience, the VR-DeMo approach and more particular CoGenIVE have proven to be useful to develop interactive virtual environments using high-level specifications.