On generating virtual worlds from domain ontologies

Abstract

Virtual Worlds are computer-hosted visual environments that create the effect of an interactive three-dimensional world in which objects have a sense of spatial and physical presence and can be manipulated by the user as such. Nowadays you need to be skilled in Virtual Reality (VR) technology to be able to develop such an environment. However, VR specialists are usually not experts in the domain for which the Virtual World need to be developed and vice versa. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows to generate a Virtual World from a domain ontology. A domain ontology describes the objects, their characteristics and their relationships that exist in the domain under consideration. In this way, a domain expert can specify the Virtual World at a high level and most of the code for the Virtual Word can be generated. We believe that such an approach can open up the use of VR to a much broader community than nowadays.