A novel method for supporting collaborative interaction management in Web-based CVE

The capabilities of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)/Extensible 3D (X3D) permit building collaborative virtual environments (CVE) using the Internet and the World Wide Web. However, they do not provide a multi-user collaborative interaction management mechanism for CVE applications except the External Authoring Interface that allows communication between external program and VRML browser. The authors of such applications must manage the interactions among the interactive entities by themselves through capturing user interaction with particular virtual entities and propagating them to the affected users. This application-specific method leads to inflexibility in reusing collaborative role definitions and adapting various collaborative interaction management methods. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Behavior Description Language(CDBL) to address the identified issues. The syntax and sample applications of CBDL will be presented in details. Our work shows that CBDL enables the reuse of collaborative role definitions and scene descriptions to construct flexible CVE with adaptive underlying collaborative interaction management methods.