View-Rules and Representations: A Framework for Dynamic Control of Multimedia in Virtual Environments

Folding multimedia capabilities into virtual environments continues to be a key driver for the future of applications that push the limit of computing and networking. Unfortunately, these applications tend to be written in a way that makes them difficult, if not impossible, to customize without major revisions. Also, users are usually given little ability to significantly customize these applications. In this paper, we describe a framework, called AlphaOmega, that embodies a unified methodology for dealing with these issues. AlphaOmega enables designer/user definition and control of the representational aspects of objects used in applications.