Structured development of 3D applications: round-trip engineering in interdisciplinary teams

Abstract

While structured software development processes are nowadays common-place, 3D applications are often still developed in an ad-hoc and code-centric manner. This state of affairs is somewhat surprising, as there are many benefits to a more structured 3D development process. In particular, model-based techniques with support for iterative development could help to ensure the mutual consistency of the code bases produced by the heterogeneous developer groups, i.e. 3D content developers and programmers. However, a cultural gap exists between 3D content developers and programmers who use completely different tools and terminologies. Common tools for model-driven development, for instance based on UML, are inadequate for the often "creatively oriented" 3D content developers. This paper presents a model-driven approach for the structured development of 3D applications in interdisciplinary teams based on round-trip engineering. Abstract models of the application are specified in SSIML, a DSL tailored for the development of 3D applications. In a forward phase, consistent skeletons of 3D scene models and program code are generated from the SSIML model. In a reverse phase, refinements of both the 3D scene model and program code are abstracted and synchronized to result in an updated SSIML model. This process is repeated in the subsequent iterations. Several examples of 3D application development on diverse platforms including Web, immersive virtual reality, and augmented reality on mobile devices demonstrate the versatility of our approach.