Sistemas de Informação: revista da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação, ISSN 0872-7031, n. 17, p. 83 -90, 2005 Collaborative Multimodal Authoring of Virtual Worlds Vítor Sá 1,2 vitor.sa@dsi.uminho.pt 1 University of Minho Campus de Azurém P-4800-058 Guimarães Filipe Marreiros 3 filipe.marreiros@ccg.pt 2 Computer Graphics Center Fraunhoferstr. 5 D-64283 Darmstadt Adérito Marcos 1,3 aderito.marcos@ccg.pt 3 Computer Graphics Center R. Teixeira de Pascoais, 596 P-4800-073 Guimarães Resumo O objectivo deste trabalho é a criação de mundos virtuais por equipas de trabalho com recurso a técnicas avançadas de interacção, tais como comandos de fala e gestos, e a dispositivos móveis. As características físicas dos ambientes de realidade virtual conduzem- nos a diferentes tipos de interfaces de utilizador. Contudo, encontramos certa utilidade no clássico paradigma WIMP, que é utilizado recorrendo a um PDA, para complementar as possibilidades de interacção. Em termos de descrição da aplicação utilizamos a linguagem de modelação para realidade virtual – VRML. Um dos principais objectivos consiste na separação/combinação de arquivos VRML para permitir o trabalho individual a cada um dos elementos da equipa, e posteriormente a combinação de resultados para produzir o mundo virtual global. Abstract This work aims the creation of virtual worlds by working teams with resource to advanced interaction techniques, such as speech commands and gestures, as well as the resource to portable devices. The physical characteristics of virtual reality environments lead us to a different kind of user interfaces. However, we found some usefulness on the classic WIMP paradigm, which we also apply by using a PDA, in order to complement the interaction possibilities. In terms of application description we use the Virtual Reality Modeling Language. One of the main goals is the separation/combination of VRML files in order to allow the work to be cared out individually by the members of the team, and later combine the results to produce the global virtual world. 1. Introduction The present article describes an experimental work in the area of the creation of virtual worlds by working teams with resource to advanced interaction techniques, such as speech commands and gestures, as well as the resource to portable devices. The use of these last ones becomes indispensable due to the physical characteristics of the environment, large projection screens or workbenches, in which it’s also useful to have access to WIMP interfaces in order to complement the user interaction possibilities. The prototype under development is very flexible mainly because: users can use several modalities, in whatever combination they desire (multi-modality); users can