Conceptual Modeling of Virtual Environments Using Hypermedia Design Techniques

Abstract

Traditionally, the development of virtual environments has been tightly dependent on the programmer’s skills to manage the available toolkits and authoring systems. In such a scenario, the discussion of different design alternatives, future changes and maintenance, interoperability, and software reuse are all of them costly and quite difficult. In order to overcome this unsystematic and technology-driven process, conceptual modeling has to be included just before the implementation phase to provide a shared representation language that facilitates the communication among the different team members, including stakeholders, as well as the reuse and redesign for future requirements since conceptual models hide implementation details and constraints, and are cheaper and easier to produce than prototypes. As a first attempt to attain these aims, this chapter presents the basis of a constructional approach for the VE conceptual modeling through a set of complementary design views related to the VE components and functions. Moreover, we explore how these design issues might be addressed by hypermedia modeling techniques, given the similarities between these two kinds of interactive systems and the maturity reached in hypermedia development.