Building objects and interactors for collaborative interactions with GASP

Abstract

asp (General Animation and Simulation Platform) was at rst designed to distribute the animation and simulation of multi-agent virtual environments. In the Gasp framework, a virtual world is composed of any number of simulation ob- jects. These simulation objects can be autonomous agents, interactors or user representations. We dene interactors as simulation objects which provide information on user input readable by any simulation object. Because simulation ob- jects can read information from any number of other simula- tion objects, it is then quite easy to design objects on which any number of users (or other simulation objects) can col- laborate. As the Gasp run-time kernel can distribute the calculations associated with those simulation objects on dif- ferent workstations, collaborative virtual environments can easily be built. In this paper, we explain how, in our frame- work, interactors and interactive objects are distributed for collaborative interactions and how it is possible to build an interactive object from an existing object without changing the code of that object.