Tiered Developer-Centric Representations for 3D Interfaces: Concept-Oriented Design in Chasm

In our experience, novel ideas for 3D interaction techniques greatly outpace developers' ability to implement them, despite the potential benefit of these ideas. We believe this is due to the inherent implementation complexity of 3D interfaces, without sufficient support from methods and tools. Believing a developer-centric representation could overcome this problem, we investigated developer practices, artifacts and language. This resulted in the theory of concept-oriented design and Chasm, a prototype realization of the theory. The key feature of concept-oriented design is its use of developer-centric representations to create a multi-tiered implementation, ranging from an envisioned behavior expressed in conversational language to low-level code. Evaluation of Chasm by domain experts and its use in multiple case studies has demonstrated that concept-oriented design in Chasm enabled developers to represent an exponential growth in 3D interface complexity with only a linear growth in implementation complexity. Positive comments by developers further support the developer-centric representation.