| Summary: | Improvements in processors and graphics hardware are making Virtual Reality (VR) increasingly attractive as means of human/computer interaction. Although there are compelling stand-alone demonstrations of specific aspects of the field, there is little in the way of generic software that supports and integrates the needs of large or complex virtual environments. Future VR systems will require 'large scale' issues to be addressed. These include complex graphics and behaviour of objects and large numbers of applications and geographically distributed users. However, beyond the graphics and networking challenges, a core issue is the specification of the environments themselves. For sophisticated environments, more appropriate methods are required than the conventional programming tools provided by existing VR systems. For virtual environments, this specification approaches a description of the metaphysical properties of the space being described and the objects it contains. In such a specification, the relationship between the user and the environment is an important consideration. This thesis argues that by building a framework for describing virtual environments upon such a metaphysically orientated s~ecification of the environments, that takes explicit account of the relation between perceiver and the perceived, many of the existing problems of VR can be successfully addressed. A VR systems architecture is developed that supports investigation of this perceptual divide between perceiver and perceived, and is demonstrably capable of facilitating these investigations in the context of 'large-scale' VR as defined above.
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