Um modelo conceitual para ambientes virtuais flexíveis

Abstract

Over the past decade, the Web has become a major platform for interaction among its users. These users have demanded more flexibility from their the tools, in a way that these tools could support interaction according to needs. This gap is even deeper in virtual environments supporting activities in complex domains like Education. These software tools should be driven by the evolving nature of people and should reflect evolution on their needs. Thus, the main objective of this work is to design a conceptual model for web-based human-to-computer-to-human-interactive virtual environments, so that these environments are flexible for creation and runtime modifiable. In search for dealing with this problem, we have investigated an innovative proposal for devising of virtual environments, called MOrFEu. In this work, we present an extension of this conceptual model able to describe in detail each component of a virtual environment. As proof of concept, we have modeled typical virtual environments and, because of their peculiar characteristics, some of them were chosen to become prototype implementations. The selected environments were evaluated with respect to their flexibility, including their ability for runtime modification through direct changes in their descriptions, giving evidence that the proposed model contributes to development and adaptation of virtual environments, which meet the interaction demands of their users, were significantly increased.