XPHEVE: An Extensible Physics Engine for Virtual Environments

Virtual reality (VR) has gained more popularity due to the advancements in hardware technology, an advancement that eliminated much of the limitations that VR technology was facing before. With the complexity that exists in today's applications, it is apparent that software issues are now the limiting factor in the development of realistic VR applications. This is largely due to lack of structure and standards in this new generation of software products. The introduction of physics engines was the first step in shaping the structure of VR applications. A physics engine is a library or a framework that hides the low-level details of the physics needed in VR applications, thus allowing developers to focus on the higher-level functionalities of the application. Although physics engines contribute to the development of more structured VR applications. While a flight simulation would appreciate such laws as planet gravity and aerodynamics, a car racing game would be more concerned with collision laws and road friction. Therefore different VR application may not only require different laws, but also laws with different precision levels. xPheve, an extensible physics engine that uses a container/plug-in architecture in which laws are treated as plug-ins; they can be plugged in and out of the physics engine depending on the application needs. A military simulation built over xPheve is highlighted