When Model Driven Engineering meets Virtual Reality: Feedback from Application to the Collaviz Framework

Despite the increasing use of 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (3D CVE), their development is still a cumbersome task. The various concerns to consider (distributed system, 3D graphics, etc.) complexify the development as well as the evolution of CVEs. Software engineering recently proposed methods and tools to ease the development process of complex software systems. Among them, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) considers models as first-class entities. A model is an abstraction of a specific aspect of the system under study for a specific purpose. MDE thus breaks down a complex system into as many models for different purposes, such as: generating code from models; building domain specific programming/modeling languages (DSL); generating tools such as graphical or textual editors. In this paper we leverage MDE for developing 3D CVEs. We show how the Collaviz framework took benefits from a DSL we built. The benefits are multiple: 3D CVE designers can focus on the behavior of their virtual objects without bothering with distributed and graphics features; configuring the content of 3D CVEs and their deployment on various software and hardware platforms can be automated through code generation. We detail the development process we propose and the experiments we conducted on Collaviz.