A description of a dialog to enable interaction between interaction tools and 3D objects in collaborative virtual environments

International audienceBuilding virtual reality applications is still a difficult and time consuming task. Software developers need a common set of 3D widgets, hardware device abstraction and a set of software components that are easy to write and use. These means are intended to provide collaborative interactions in rich virtual applications, easy use of many input devices, and easy deployment on multi-sites for shared environments. We propose in this paper a new formalism for 3D interactions in virtual environments to define what an interactive object and an interaction tool are, and how these two kinds of virtual objects can communicate together. As a consequence, we describe a communication protocol between interaction tools and interactive objects. We then obtain users on different sites that are able to interact in a shared environment with interactive objects that are provided with access levels. Moreover, this protocol introduces interoperability between VR platforms. Finally we explain how we implement this protocol with aggregations of reusable small software components to ease development of VR applications