Beschreibung
Virtual Environments enable the creation of fantastical worlds, limited only by the imagination of their authors. They can come to life through specialized software, constrained only by the prowess of the developer. Unfortunately, the level of sophistication required to make Virtual Environments (VEs) come to life is a hurdle that makes such environments uncommon. This book presents work that focuses on interesting, captivating, affective VEs and the tools necessary to create them.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, the nature of such VEs is investigated. Based on the assumption that the two main components computer science can support are their dynamic and interactive components, an exploration and analysis of the design space of Dynamic, Interactive Virtual Environments (DIVEs) is performed. In the second part, a framework of support for the development of DIVEs is propose, based on insights won in the first part. The Functional Reactive Virtual Reality (FRVR) is built up from the combination of the emerging programming paradigm Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) and existing Virtual Reality software. Example applications demonstrate how DIVEs can be implemented using FRVR and testify to the flexibility and power of the approach.