VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT ARCHITECTURES:
INTEROPERABILITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Table of Contents:
- Principal Investigator.
- Productivity Measures.
- Summary of Objectives and Approach.
- Detailed Summary of Technical Progress.
- Transitions and DOD Interactions.
- Software and Hardware Prototypes.
- List of Publications.
- Invited and Contributed Presentations.
- Honors, Prizes or Awards Received.
- Project personnel promotions obtained.
- Project Staff.
- Misc Hypermedia URL.
- Keywords.
Principal Investigator.
- PI Name: James M. Purtilo
- PI Institution: University of Maryland
- PI Phone Number: 301 405 2706
- PI Fax Number: 301 405 6707
- PI E-mail Address: purtilo@cs.umd.edu
- PI URL Home Page: http://thumper.cs.umd.edu/files
- Grant Title: VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT ARCHITECTURES:
INTEROPERABILITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE
- Grant/Contract Number: N000149410320
- R&T Number: who knows these things?
- Reporting Period: 1994
Productivity Measures.
- Number of refereed papers submitted not yet published: 5
- Number of refereed papers published: 10
- Number of unrefereed reports and articles: 0
- Number of books or parts thereof submitted but not published: 0
- Number of books or parts thereof published: 1
- Number of project presentations: 0
- Number of patents filed but not yet granted: 0
- Number of patents granted and software copyrights: 0
- Number of graduate students supported >= 25% of full time: 2
- Number of post-docs supported >= 25% of full time: 0
- Number of minorities supported: 0
Summary of Objectives and Approach.
- Virtual reality (VR) is emerging as an important approach to the modeling
and simulation of complex systems. But software technology for scientists
to build VR-based applications fosters development of closed applications
each built from scratch. A scientist's ability to merge models and systems
once developed is solely dependent upon their ability to `hack' software,
since the principles of VR system interconnection are poorly understood and
no software engineering guidelines have ever been developed for use in VR
applications.
We are studying the issue of interoperation between VR systems, that is
the virtual environment, in order to discover essential principles governing
their construction and effective use. Our approach focuses upon the control
properties of interfaces between VR applications: existing VR applications
will be examined in order to expose commonalities, and our abstractions of
VR control behavior will be specified in terms of the software bus model of
interconnection. As principles of VR interoperation emerge, we will build
prototype implementations of corresponding software interconnection tools to
evaluate the application of those principles back in the domains from which
our test problems were drawn. As a result of this research, scientists who
use VR technology will have a sound basis for leveraging existing resources
in new applications, and similarly, they will have an appropriately abstract
framework for specifying how multiple models should be merged operationally.
Detailed Summary of Technical Progress.
- Our analysis of existing VR applications proceeds as study
architectural walk-through programs. In collaboration with colleagues at
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we have preliminary apparatus
assembled to interconnect multiple instantiations of existing walk-through
processes, and will shortly be testing this mapped across various underlying
network configurations.
Transitions and DOD Interactions.
Software and Hardware Prototypes.
List of Publications.
- Surgeon: a packager for dynamically reconfigurable distributed
applications. C. Hofmeister, E. White and J. Purtilo.
Software Engineering Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, (March 1993), pp. 95-101.
- The Polylith Software Bus. J. Purtilo. ACM
Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems}, vol. 16, no. 1,
(January 1994), pp. 151-174.
- A pattern-based object linking mechanism for component-based
software development environments.
L. Spicknall Fruth, E. White and J. Purtilo
To appear, Journal of Systems and Software.
- Dynamic reconfiguration in distributed systems: Adapting software
modules for replacement. C. Hofmeister and J. Purtilo.
IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computer Systems,
pp. 101-110, (May 1993).
- A packager for multicast software in distributed systems.
C. Chen, E. White and J. Purtilo.
International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge
Engineering}, (1993), pp. 612-621.
- Experiences with CCB-directed projects in the classroom.
J. Purtilo and S. Siegel.
Proceedings of SEI Conference on SE Education, (1994), pp. 285-302.
- Planning for change: a reconfiguration language for distributed
systems.
B. Agnew, C. Hofmeister and J. Purtilo.
Proceedings of International Workshop on Configurable
Distributed System, (1994), pp. 15-22.
- Virtual environment architectures: interoperability through
software interconnection technology.
P.D. Stotts and J. Purtilo.
Proceedings of Third IEEE Workshop on Enabling Technologies:
Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Morgantown WVa,
IEEE Computer Society Press, (April 1994), pp. 211-224.
- Tool support for tailored software prototyping.
C. Chen, A. Porter and J. Purtilo.
Proceedings of Symposium on Assessment of Quality Software
Development Tools, (June 1994), pp. 171-181.
- Configuration-level programming of distributed applications
using implicit invocation.
C. Chen and J. Purtilo.
Proceedings of IEEE Int'l Conference on Frontiers of Computer Technology,
Singapore, (August 1994), pp. 43-49.
Invited and Contributed Presentations.
Honors, Prizes or Awards Received.
Project Personnel Promotions Obtained.
Project Staff.
- The entire interconnection team is
-
Jim Purtilo
-
Liz White
-
Chen Chen
-
Tae-Hyung Kim
-
Charles Falkenberg
-
Gilberto Matos
-
Liqin Cao
-
Scott Walker
-
Brent Agnew
-
Jim Duff
-
... And the Next Generation ...
Misc Hypermedia.
Keywords.
- Dynamic reconfiguration
- Software bus
- Virtual Reality Infrastructure