Introduction to Scene Editor

Scene Editor Overview

Modern computer programming gives users a lot of tools. For user interfaces, there are editors that allow dragging around buttons. Similarly, games are created in game engines that allow visual manipulation of objects and databases which can be adjusted without even writing code, in some cases. Historically, many of these advances have been near exclusively visual, using drag and drop, and are rarely accessible. Quorum Studio is working to change this by introducing "Scene Editor."

The idea of Scene Editor was inspired largely by computer gaming engines. For example, Unity3D contains a rich and powerful 2D or 3D editor, which can be used to make changes in games, create art or models, and generally manipulate the objects on the screen while writing little code. Other game engines are similar in many respects. For example, 3D modeling libraries, like Maya or Blender, use hardware-accelerated graphics to let a user drag and drop, or otherwise manipulate, graphical objects to create 3D models. Game editors like Tiled have made it easier to create 2D map layouts for games, again using visual metaphors. Libraries for scientific computing, 3D printing, and many other applications have followed a similar path of development in using graphics to better afford ease of use. The advantages of these systems are clear, but traditionally these ideas have not been accessible to people with disabilities, especially visual ones. Scene Editor takes the advantages of many other visual editing systems and makes it accessible.

Next Tutorial

In the next tutorial, we will discuss Components of the Scene Editor, which describes components of the scene editor in Quorum Studio.