Integrierte Werkzeuge zur Erstellung virtueller Umgebungen

Virtual environments gain importance in the areas of education, training, art and entertainment, as well as in manufacturing and visualization. Therefore, the development of scenarios for virtual envrionments should be made possible for the end-users. They should not be required to possess special knowledge in 3D modelling or programming. SAVEace, a development environment for the safety training simulator SAVE, achieves this goal by offering support for the most substantial work procedures in the construction of scenarios. The user builds scenarios from prebuilt components in an easy-to-use 3D editor, defines dependencies and procedures in a graphical editor using visual programming and generates a suitable 2D graphical user interface for the instructor in an additional editor. All the editors are connected with each other and only display components which are relevant to them. New components can be imported or created by combining existing components in a compound component. Testing and tuning may take place at the same time as building the scenario, because the development environment can be synchronized with the simulation over a network connection. In this way the user of the simulator becomes part of the developing scenario and can test and refine it immediately. An additional module permits the acquisition and later visualization of data from the sensors and the simulation in the 3D editor, which allows the author to draw conclusions regarding the ergonomics and the usability of the scenario.