Enabling behavior reuse in development of virtual environment applications

Virtual environments (VEs) provide simulated 3D spaces in which users can interact, collaborate, and visualize in real time. Accordingly, virtual environments have the potential to transform education, creating classrooms that ignore geographic boundaries and immerse students in experiences that would be difficult or impossible to arrange in the real world. A major impediment to the widespread adoption of educational VEs is the high cost of developing VE applications. We believe application development must become tractable for non-expert users in the same way that Web development is no longer the exclusive purview of professional programmers. In this position paper, we describe our experiences in enabling behavior reuse across VE applications. Our approach replaces, whenever possible, application-specific behaviors with general purpose, reusable simulation modules. These modules bootstrap one another until a rich ecosystem develops; thus, VE application development is reduced to compositing content and behaviors instead of developing them from scratch.