Providing more interactivity to virtual museums: A proposal for a VR authoring tool

This paper describes the museuVirtual project that is developing an authori ng tool for the collaborative building of nonimmersive museums in virtual r eality. The rationale behind museuVirtual is based on the observation that virtual museums found on the Internet normally have very limited opportunit ies for user interactivity. We examine different kinds of interactivity and propose an authoring tool that allows a teacher or student to create virtu al exhibits in which dynamic interactive objects and chatterbots may be pro grammed in a relatively easy way. This proposal is strongly based on the co ncepts of actor-based programming and constructivist theory, which have bee n applied in the last five years to teach basic programming skills to begin ners. The ideas applied with success in many previous experiments using 2-D graphics are now being introduced in an authoring tool that generates VRML /Java code. The museuVirtual project is developing a tool that not only all ows the students to be the organizers and curators of their own museums, bu t also to work collaboratively, by building such museums in a virtual distr ibuted environment.