Web-enabled Server-based and Distributed Real-time Ray-Tracing

Abstract

As browsers expand their functionality, they continuously act as a platform for portable application development within a web page. To bring interactive 3D graphics closer to the web developer, frameworks allowing a declarative scene description in line with the HTML markup exist. However, these approaches utilize client-side rendering and are thus limited in the scene complexity and rendering algorithms they can provide on a given device. We present the extension of the declarative 3D framework XML3D to support server-based rendering. The server back-end enables distributed rendering with an arbitrary hierarchy of cluster nodes. In the back-end, we deploy a custom real-time ray-tracer. To distribute the ray-tracer, we present a load balancing method which exploits frame-to-frame coherence in a real-time context. The load balancer achieves strong scalability without inducing communication overhead during rendering to coordinate the workers.