AVIARY – A Generic Virtual Reality Interface for Real Applications A.J. West * , T.L.J. Howard, R.J. Hubbold, A.D. Murta, D.N. Snowdon, D.A. Butler Advanced Interfaces Group Department of Computer Science University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom Tel: +44 61 275 6251 Fax: +44 61 275 6236 Keywords: Virtual Reality, VR, generic virtual world, parallelism, computer graphics, transputer, object-oriented techniques, extensible languages, human-computer interfaces, AVIARY Abstract This paper introduces the work of the Advanced Interfaces Group at the University of Manchester, which is applying recent innovations in the field of human-computer interaction to important real- world applications, whose present human-computer interfaces are difficult and unnatural. We begin with an analysis of the problems of existing interfaces, and present an overview of our proposed solution– AVIARY, the generic, hierarchical, extensible virtual world model. We describe a users’ conceptual model for AVIARY,implementation strategies for software and hardware, and the ap- plication of the model to specific real-world problems. 1 Introduction Our motivation for the work described in this paper is that we perceive many of the interfaces to today’s complex computer applications to be difficult and unnatural to use. With any computer system it is necessary for users to be trained in using the system if they are to become adept at manipulating infor- mation via the system’s interface. Indeed, a central problem of designing good user interfaces is that humans are very adaptable, and will often learn to cope with poor interfaces. Historically, the power of the computer to assist with complex tasks has made it so valuable a machine, that the issue of whether the interface is good or bad has almost seemed to be of secondary importance. For straightforward tasks, such as word processing, the past decade has seen a major improvement in user interfaces based on direct manipulation, as exemplified by the popular ‘desktop’ paradigm. However, systems are becoming ever more complex, and there is evidence that paradigms such as this do not extend readily into these more complicated areas. We offer two particular examples which illustrate this situation. The first concerns the problems of three-dimensional design. 3D graphics has been researched and used for thirty years – see, for example Tim Johnson’s paper of 1963 [1] – and efforts have continued to improve the interfaces for 3D display and direct manipulation [2, 3]. Much of this has been hampered * Author for correspondence, ajw@cs.man.ac.uk 1