The Scalable High Performance Virtual Reality Project

The SHPVR project is the result of a close collaboration between researchers from the Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Orléans and the Laboratoire Informatique et Distribution, Grenoble.

High Performance Virtual Reality applications must intensively use parallelism to obtain the required computation power. But parallel programming is time consuming and diverts the programmer from its main goal: to develop innovative VR applications.

The goal of the Scalable High Performance Virtual Reality Project is to study and develop VR specific parallelization schemes. Integrated in a VR platform, high performance will be available for virtual reality applications with little programming effort.

We target multi display environments, like Caves or Workbenches, and commodity components machines, like PC clusters equipped with off-the-shelf graphics and sound cards.

First developments include two open source softwares, Net Juggler and SoftGenLock. The association of these libraries makes possible to run a VR Juggler application with active stereo and multi displays on a commodity component PC cluster:

• Net Juggler: cluster support for VR Juggler ;
• SoftGenLock: software genlock and active stereo support ;