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Extending a distributed virtual reality system with exchangeable rendering back-ends

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Abstract

We present an approach to integrate multiple rendering back-ends under a common application layer for distributed systems. The primary goal was to find a practical and nonintrusive way to use potentially very different renderers in heterogeneous computing environments without impairing their strengths and without burdening the back-ends or the application with details of the cluster environment. Our approach is based on a mediator layer that handles multithreading, clustering, and the synchronization between the application’s and the back-end’s scene. We analyze the proposed approach with an implementation for a state-of-the-art distributed VR/AR system. In particular, we present two case studies and an example application.

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Notes

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIHV3yC3IYo, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0SUWqJfQsE.

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Acknowledgements

The Buddha model was provided by the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository; the Sponza scene was provided by Crytek GmbH and Marko Dabrovic; the Powerplant model was provided by the GAMMA research group at UNC; the 777 model was provided by Boeing. We would also like to thank Jens Keil for the photographs in Fig. 1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany

    Karsten Schwenk, Johannes Behr, Yvonne Jung, Max Limper, Pasquale Herzig & Arjan Kuijper

  2. TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Karsten Schwenk, Max Limper & Arjan Kuijper

  3. Fraunhofer IDM@NTU, NTU, Singapore, Singapore

    Gerrit Voß

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  1. Karsten Schwenk
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  2. Gerrit Voß
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  3. Johannes Behr
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  4. Yvonne Jung
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  5. Max Limper
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  6. Pasquale Herzig
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  7. Arjan Kuijper
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Correspondence to Karsten Schwenk.

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Schwenk, K., Voß, G., Behr, J. et al. Extending a distributed virtual reality system with exchangeable rendering back-ends. Vis Comput 29, 1039–1049 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0836-y

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