Software engineering support for reliably interconnecting legacy virtual environments

As the power and utility of virtual reality environments increases, so do the potential benefits found from combining several such environments. The US Department of Defense currently uses over 2000 simulators, and has mandated that they all be interoperable through its High Level Architecture. Modifying these legacy systems to interact through an abstract software layer presents the developer with a host of difficult software engineering issues, not the least of which is how to build a system that will remain configured to provide realistic behavior in spite of system anomalies. The paper explores some of these issues such as coordinate translation and event mapping and gives our suggestion for automating the construction of an abstraction layer. It also examines how we keep an interconnected virtual environment properly configured regardless of system anomalies. We relate our successes to date in overcoming these problems by means of various automated tools.