A generic approach for interfacing VRML browsers to various input devices and creating customizable 3D applications

In this work we present a generic architecture for interfacing various input devices to VRML browsers. Concentrating on the aspect of navigation, our system supports the full range of potential input devices from conventional haptic devices like keyboard and mouse over special Virtual-Reality devices like spacemouse and joystick to, as a special feature, semantically higher level input like speech and gesture recognition. The communication between the individual components of the system is based on a context free grammar, allowing abstract modeling of the various devices and handling both discrete and continuous navigation information. Two new node extensions support the VRML author in creating highly customizable 3D applications: The DeviceSensor node allows grabbing arbitrary user input in a systematic way and the Camera node gives full control over the scene view by specifying velocity vectors and thus enabling arbitrary navigation modes. Finally, the proof of concept is given by a prototypical implementation in VRML.