Metis: An Object-Oriented Toolkit for Constructing Virtual Reality
Applications
Russell Turner, Song Li, Enrico Gobbetti
To appear in Computer Graphics Forum
Keywords
Virtual Reality, Object-Oriented Toolkits, Constraints, 3D Interaction
Abstract
Virtual reality systems provide realistic look and feel by seamlessly integrating
three-dimensional input and output devices. One software architecture approach
to constructing such systems is to distribute the application between a
computation-intensive simulator back-end and a graphics-intensive viewer
front-end which implements user interaction. In this paper we discuss Metis,
a toolkit we have been developing based on such a software architecture,
which can be used for building interactive immersive virtual reality systems
with computationally intensive components. The Metis toolkit defines
an application programming interface on the simulator side, which communicates
via a network with a standalone viewer program that handles all immersive
display and interactivity. Network bandwidth and interaction latency are
minimized, by use of a constraint network on the viewer side that declaratively
defines much of dynamic and interactive behavior of the application.
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