Qualitative physics in virtual environments

In this paper, we describe a new approach to the creation of virtual environments, which uses qualitative physics to implement object behaviour. We adopted Qualitative Process Theory as a qualitative reasoning formalism, due to its representational properties (e.g., its orientation towards process ontologies and its explicit formulation of process’ pre-conditions). The system we describe is developed using a game engine and takes advantage of its event-based system to integrate qualitative process simulation in an interactive fashion. We use a virtual kitchen as a test environment. In this virtual world, we have implemented various behaviours: physical object behaviour, complex device behaviour (appliances) and “alternative” (i.e. nonrealistic) behaviours, which can all be simulated in user real-time. After a presentation of the system architecture and its implementation, we discuss example results from the prototype. This approach has potential applications in simulation and tr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Marc Cavazza, Simon Hartley, Jean-Luc Lugrin, Mikael Le Bras
• Keywords: IUI 2004, Object Behaviour, Qualitative Process, Qualitative Process Theory, Software Engineering