Retargeting of virtual reality applications

Current practices in development of Virtual Reality (VR) applications are very costly in general and difficult to adapt to various VR platforms. This thesis solves some of the issues related to the development of VR applications when a variety of hardware platforms is available, as in current VR labs and development sites. We make visible at a high level of abstraction the most important elements in the interface of a VR application. Current representation methods of VR are either too formal or too close to a programming language to be understood by users, which precludes the analysis, evaluation, and improvement of interface issues. We define a clean separation between different software components in a VR application and its associated semantics. This separation allows us to reuse VR components, without having to worry about unexpected side-effects. We also define a new way to transform an application from one hardware platform to another. We call this process retargeting, and it is based on our ability of component reuse and the high level of abstraction language we define. We separate two important roles in the development of VR applications. One is in charge of the overall architecture of the application. They pay attention to interface issues, requirements coverage, and component reuse. The second one is in charge of fine-detail development of components and its tuning to a particular deployment environment. We consider this separation an important way to handle complexity in the development process. It enables different people to concentrate on different issues and at the same time collaborate on the development.