Distributed Open Inventor: A Practical Approach to Distributed 3D Graphics

Distributed Open Inventor is an extension to the popular Open Inventor toolkit for interactive 3D graphics. The toolkit is extended with the concept of a distributed shared scene graph, similar to distributed shared memory. From the application programmer's perspective, multiple workstations share a common scene graph. The proposed system introduces a convenient mechanism for writing distributed graphical applications based on a popular tool in an almost transparent manner. Local variations in the scene graph allow for a wide range of possible applications, and local low latency interaction mechanisms called input streams enable high performance while saving the programmer from network peculiarities. Keywords Distributed graphics, concurrent programming, scene graph, distributed virtual environment, computer supported cooperative work, virtual reality 1