ISAAC : A Virtual Environment Tool for the Interactive Construction of Virtual Worlds

This paper presents a description of ISAAC, the Immersive Simulation Animation And Construction program designed and built at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). ISAAC is a scene composition application for the interactive construction of virtual worlds. Working directly in a virtual environment, objects can be positioned, oriented and scaled using direct and indirect manipulation techniques. Object configurations are stored in ASCII files which can be used to recreate object configurations at a later date for further manipulation and interactive exploration. ISAAC is not a modeling program, worlds are created by manipulating pre-generated three-dimensional models (which can come from sources such as Computer-Aided Design programs or three-dimensional scanning devices). ISAAC has been designed to overcome some of the limitations of working in a virtual environment and to take advantage of the natural and intuitive forms of interaction available in a virtual world.