GIVEN - Gesture Driven Interactions in Virtual ENvironments. A toolkit approach to 3D interactions

This paper presents our approach to describing 3D interaction in virtual environments and the resulting toolkit called GIVEN (Gesture Driven Interactions in Virtual ENvironment). GIVEN implements basic concepts such as gesture dialogue language, input device independence, object orientation and a toolkit approach to 3D interactions. We show how these concepts, as they are implemented in GIVEN, allow us to gain flexibility and modularity in various types of application areas for simulating real or artificial 3D scenes in virtual environments. First, we explain the background of GIVEN together with our view of interaction in virtual environments. The concepts behind the implementation will be explained and the toolkit-oriented architecture of the system together with explanations of its parts and specific functionalities will be given. Finally, some ideas about future work and open questions concerning this topic are discussed.