SORA: a Service-Oriented Rendering Architecture

In the field of visual computing, different technolo-gies like multimedia or physics simulation merge with 3D computer graphics to create more realistic virtual worlds. During this process, 3D scene graph systems have evolved from being pure hierarchical containers of 3D geometry to full application specification frame-works. Through scripting and event routing, for exam-ple, the specification of entire (sub-)applications is pos-sible inside a scene graph. Nonetheless, today’s scene graph renderers are very monolithic: the single renderer has to be aware of every individual node type and its specific implementation. This makes exchange and recombination of different renderers impossible. In contrast to a single-renderer approach, we present SORA, a service-oriented archi-tecture for rendering. SORA enables combining differ-ent specialized services, each of which operating only on parts of the same scene graph. We show an exten-sible and flexible framework for describing and imple-menting such services, as well as example service im-plementations interacting with each other. [Copyright notice will appear here once ’preprint ’ option is removed.] 1