Authoring communicating agents in virtual environments

3D-graphics popularity has steadily increased in a number of areas such as entertainment, scientific visualization, simulation, and virtual reality. Despite this rapid growth the authoring of animated 3D objects in virtual environments is still by no means trivial. This article presents new concepts of the animated 3D programming language SAM (Solid Agents in Motion) and its programming environment. In SAM, the main syntactic objects like agents, rules, and messages are represented as 3D objects. The design of a SAM program is supported by a dedicated 3D structure editor. The editor allows the definition and spatial arrangement of SAM agents in a 3D scene by direct manipulation. The paper gives a number of SAM examples, demonstrating the authoring of simple animated virtual 3D scenarios.