Development of a Distributed Scene Toolkit Based on Open Inventor

A distributed scene toolkit may be very useful for development of shared virtual environment applications, for example 3D multiplayer games, because time-sensitive distributed applications put to programmers many extraordinary consistency problems.

In the paper (pdf, ps) we will present basis of such a toolkit, its design and implementation based on popular Open Inventor library.

The core idea is that one computer is the scene server and all others are the clients. The scene server manages the scene graph and can be used for viewing and modifying the scene as clients do. The client computers are like replica managers. They hold copies of the server's scene graph and make all synchronization work. The toolkit implements algorithms for keeping a scene consistency up. The Network interface is convenient access to network functions and whole toolkit should help programmers in development of 3D graphics distributed applications.

Some screenshots of a demo-application:

I have run the application on two computers (only locally on the screenshot) and made connection among the scene graphs of the computer-driven ships, so the slave ship has been synchronized as he received the update messages from the master ship on the other computer.

There is another screenshot, where I have established the connection between the root-nodes of the scene graphs of the two computers (for the screenshot they have been run locally). So, the whole scene graphs are kept synchronized. We can see the same rotation of the planets, the same position and direction of the viewer. The little bit strange differencies between the positions of the computer-driven ships is caused by the 'latency' among the applications.

This page is maintained by PC John (peciva@fit.vutbr.cz,
http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~peciva/). Last modified: June 10, 2002