WebTalk04: a Declarative Approach to Generate 3D Collaborative Environments

Even if graphics hardware and 3D technologies are rapidly evolving and the increased internet connection speed allows to share amount of data and information between user geographically distributed, the development of networked three-dimensional applications is still complicated and demands expert knowledge. Though some collaborative Web 3D technologies and applications had already been developed, most of them are concerned especially to offer an high level realistic representation of the virtual world as increasing the level of detail would mean to increase the “virtual presence” sense in the 3D world; at the same time they don’t support from one hand an high level, non-expert authoring process, from the other the concept of programming flexibility and of component reuse is rarely taken into account. We advocate the need of drastically simplify authoring and personalization phases through formal description of the interaction’s sets as well as of the behavioural features and rules, that we call “collaborative metaphors”, in a component oriented fashion to drive collaboration among users in the specific way a designer is intended to do. As result of previous considerations we present WebTalk04, a declarative 3D component system based on XML documents describing not only the environment formal structure of the virtual world were the action take place but also the complex interaction set of rules that control interactions between users and world objects used to stimulate certain kind of collaboration, thus effectively help fast prototyping and an easy building up of such collaborative applications. The WebTalk04 system also provide a runtime 3D rendering engine fully configurable through XML in order to easily modify virtual world settings as well as collaborative interaction rules thus allowing to control independently geometries, behaviors and contents, assigning to different developer (i.e software developer , content developer , graphics developer , session designers) different task.