Virtual worlds on demand? Model-driven development of JavaScript-based virtual world UI components for mobile apps

Virtual worlds and avatar-based interactive computer games are a hype among consumers and researchers for many years now. In recent years, such games on mobile devices also became increasingly important. However, most virtual worlds require the use of proprietary clients and authoring environments and lack portability, which limits their usefulness for targeting wider audiences like e.g. in consumer marketing or sales. Using mobile devices and client-side web technologies like i.e. JavaScript in combination with a more automatic generation of customer-specific virtual worlds could help to overcome these limitations. Here, model-driven software development (MDD) provides a promising approach for automating the creation of user interface (UI) components for games on mobile devices. Therefore, in this paper an approach is proposed for the model-driven generation of UI components for virtual worlds using JavaScript and the upcoming Famo.us framework. The feasibilty of the approach is evaluated by implementing a proof-of-concept scenario.