The GEditor is a Glass tool which simplifies the design of graphical
interfaces and their interaction with the Virtual Reality
applications, freeing the designer from having to know all the
details of the individual technologies, and to use PDAs (Personal
Digital Assistant) as interaction devices. The interfaces
generated are simple and intuitive, and can be used even by
untrained users to interact with a distributed virtual environment.
This solution requires no programming knowledge from the GUI
designer.
This tool proposes a simple approach to GUIs. Instead of the usual
set of widgets present in most GUI APIs, an image is used. The
designer then defines hot spot areas on this image, which can be
associated to events of the application. A complex GUI, with
alphanumeric fields, menus, etc., reduces the feeling of immersion,
since the user has to concentrate on the device instead of on the
application.
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gEditor Interface
The application generated using gEditor communicates
transparently with the cluster, via any underlying network system,
which processes the events and maintains the synchrony of the
rendered images in real-time. Moreover, the interface and its
configuration can be changed at run-time. The
use of Java by this application allows it be
executed on many different operational systems (Windows, Linux,
Windows CE, IRIX) and platforms.
The use of asynchronous messages guarantees that the other nodes do not suffer
a performance loss, even when slow platforms, such as PDAs, are used.
The PDA node can be initialized or
shut down at any moment, and the application will keep running. This
is useful to have several PDAs running simultaneously for
instance, each PDA may be controlling a different vehicle of a
simulator.
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