Virtual Reality Programming in Oz

摘要

To build virtual environments with interesting behavior it is desirable to use a high level language suitable for complex symbolic computations. But languages such as Lisp, Prolog and Smalltalk do not support concurrecy, reactivity and real-time control which are vital for Virtual-Reality (VR) applications. However the new concurrent constraint programming paradigm in general, and Oz in particular support these requirements. Oz is designed to support multiple concurrent agents, which makes it well-suited for VR-applications. We have therefore implemented a basic interface between Oz and a toolkit for building distributed VR applications, DIVE. Furthermore we have developed a object layer for supporting agent abstractions. We are usign this to build a framework for Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) specialized for defining agents in virtual environments for simulations. The framework is used to develop a system allowing collaborative configuration of virtual battlefields and battle simulations where the computer generated forces are controlled with spoken natural language.