SENDA: A Whole Process to Develop Virtual Environments

Abstract

The use of virtual environments (VEs) is increasing rapidly, and people are demanding easier and more credible ways to interact with these new sites. We define VEs as a special kind of 3D virtual environment, inhabited by avatars which represent humans in the VE, or even autonomous agents. This kind of software was selected because of its increasing importance as the new future trend in interactive software applications. From a software engineering point of view, VEs can be seen as a special kind of information system, so they must be analyzed, designed, and implemented in this respect. Our aim is to improve software engineering’s traditional software processes to achieve quality VEs. In this chapter, we present a framework called SENDA, which defines a formal process model to develop VEs.