VIRCAST (virtual reality CASe tool) a diagramming CASE tool to model and generate scene graph based virtual reality environments

The development of a Virtual Reality (VR) environment differs from the development of regular software applications and systems. Existing software design tools do not cater for these differences. Due to the com- plexity of the VR development process a design tool that targets these unique requirements is of considerable advantage to VR developers. This project set out to create an extensible VR Application Program- ming Interface (API) model and a VR development tool that can be con- figured for a variety of VR APIs. The concept of an interactive scene graph diagram is very important in the development of VR environments, hence this API model is a scene graph modeller based upon a diagram view rather than a tree view. The tool also contains a source code generator with the ability to generate code for different VR APIs. Java 3D is a prominent API set developed by Sun for the construction of complex VR environments. Java 3D is comprised of over one hundred different classes each with its own set of methods, and has an extensible architecture enabling support for third-party extensions. The Java 3D API set is used in this project as a test case for the new modeller. The modeller has been found to be intutitive, accurate, and a useful tool for rapid development.