Open ActiveWrl - A Middleware Based Software Development Toolkit for Immersive VE Systems

Abstract

A Virtual Environment (VE) is not an application in itself. It should further be seen as a complex, multi modal human-computer interface. Immersive VE systems must be able to couple resources, most likely distributed in a cluster, into a parallel, real-time simulation. The shortcoming of most VE software libraries is the inability to provide an environment that satisfies the three main requirements in the implementation of a VE system, namely the design of the VE interface, the implementation of the actual application and the distribution of parallel tasks to appropriate resources within a cluster system. This paper presents Open ActiveWrl, an open source software project that tackles these problems by a generic software development approach. It is tailored for heterogenous cluster systems. Open ActiveWrl uses a general-purpose middleware that interprets VRML/X3D as an interface definition language.