Developing virtual reality applications: The design and evaluation of virtual reality development tools for novice users.
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Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.
History
The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.
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1969-present
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
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Developing applications for Virtual Reality(VR) systems is difficult because of the special- ized hardware required, complexity of VR software, and the technical expertise needed to use both together. We have develop tools and applications that support the authoring of virtual reality applications. The tools will support development of VR applications based on common requirements of the hardware and architecture used in VR systems.
We developed support for animations, geometry morphs, deformable geometry, advanced particle systems, importing digital assets, embedding a scripting language virtual machine, sound library wrappers, video library wrappers, and physics library wrappers for the OpenSG framework. The KabalaEngine was developed to use the supporting libraries previously men- tioned in a clustered VR system using OpenSG's clustering capabilities. The KabalaEngine has an expert graphical user interface that can be used for developing virtual environments. Finally, we developed a graphical user interface for novice users of the KabalaEngine. We found that users of the KabalaEngine were able to use the interface to produce three different complex virtual environments with 10-15 different 3D objects arranged in a meaningful way in fifty minutes.