Visual behavior authoring for interactive 3-D applications

In creating interactive 3-D applications, conventional textual programming languages are currently used to describe the behavior of 3-D objects. While textual language programming is very powerful, it is extremely time-consuming and requires a high level of programming skills. In this paper, the authors propose a new framework, the Trigger-Action (TA) based application-description data model and the authoring environment based on this data model. Within this framework, application authors can describe object; behavior visually, with no need for textual language programming. They can describe object behavior by first using a direct-manipulation based editor to create simple behavior units (Trigger-Actions) that include actions and their start-conditions, and then use a visual programming editor to define Trigger-Action Graphs (TAG) execution-sequences of the behavior units. The authors show a prototype authoring environment based on this visual programming framework, and also show some example applications created with it.