A Model-View Driven Architecture for VR-Based Simulations

Despite recent advances in software and hardware aspects of virtual reality (VR), from the software design point of view VR technology remains primitive. In particular, most existing VR applications suffer from lack of extensibility, maintainability and reusability. Examples of successful architectures include those of web-based applications that utilize such technologies as XML (extensible markup language) and XSL (extensible style sheets) to separate the data models from the view. VR simulations are similar to web-based applications in that they may also consist of some models (e.g., mathematical models) and views (3D representations of the mathematical models). This paper presents an architecture that dynamically generates VR simulations based on XML models that are received as input. Theses XML models are used to define and configure the various elements of an interactive VR application, such as 3D graphics, mathematical or other models and the nature of user interactions (i.e. haptic interaction, physical attributes, etc).