WP04 AMIRE Components

The main objective of this workpackage is to identify, design and implement a number of relevant high-level domain specific components, collected in a MR Component Library that can be used in a wide range of application scenarios. AMIRE will provide better and more efficient management reuse of high-level MR components combined with dedicated tools for authoring. The development of application specific frameworks will be supported by a set of base components and management unit for handling and execution (MR gems). Existing standards like XML or LOM will be used for describing the component's functionality.

Reusable components

With reusable components, that are developed once and used in many different applications (in modified versions), cost-effective development will be possible. Using these predefined components will significantly decrease the technical development phase, which is currently the key factor to cost effective MR authoring. Existing applications built with the AMIRE MR components will be easily modified and extended increasing customer satisfaction. The MR customer will be accessed through dedicated authoring tools.

AMIRE MR components will be efficiently executed due to the realtime demands of mixed reality applications. The proposed flexibility of the AMIRE MR components will require the design and execution of components on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. In addition to this, the MR components library will be fully extensible allowing the programmer to add new objects and operations through the use of subclassing and callback functions.

MR components will be composed of geometry models as well as animations and simulations of behaviour. An example of MR components could be a "explosion view"-component that illustrate the inner details of a real machine by providing a suitable animation of virtual machine parts.

The work in this workpackage will be carried out in four sequential tasks:

• In a first phase the MR component expert will work out a requirements analysis.
• During the second task the scope of the MR components will be defined taking into account the requirements coming from the MR framework and MR applications (museum and oil-refinery).
• The third task will be focused to the development of the first prototypes of MR components, which will be used to develop the oil-refinery demonstrator.
• Finally, during the fourth task the components library will be tested, extended and refined.