An open software architecture for virtual reality interaction

Virtual Reality, 2001. …, 2001

OpenTracker, an open software architecture that provides a generic solution to the different tasks involved in tracking input devices and processing tracking data for virtual environments. It combines a highly modular design with a configuration syntax based on XML, thus taking full advantage of this new technology. OpenTracker is a first attempt towards a "write once, track anywhere" approach to virtual reality application development. To support these claims, integration into an existing augmented reality system is demonstrated. Once development is sufficiently mature, it is planned to make Open-Tracker available to the public under an open source software license. ¢ An object-oriented approach to an extensive set of sensor access, filtering, fusion, and state transformation operations ¢ Behavior specification by constructing graphs of tracking objects (similar in spirit to scene graphs or event cascades) from user defined tracker configuration files ¢ Distributed simulation by network transfer of tracker state at any point in the graph structure ¢ Decoupled simulation by transparent multi-threading and networking ¢ A software engineering approach based on XML [6], which allows to use many generic tools such as 9, for development, documentation, and configuration.

40th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting & Exhibit, 2002

This paper describes VR Juggler, an Open Source platform used to develop and run virtual reality applications. We emphasize VR Juggler's ability to provide a uniform VR application environment and to allow extendibility to new devices without affecting existing applications. These features enable VR applications to evolve along side other technologies with minimal or no new developmental efforts.

2003

Theory and Practice …, 2005

In this paper, we present a framework for experimenting with virtual environments. The architecture of the system VRECKO is designed for the rapid prototyping of techniques for human-computer interaction. The architecture is flexible, but simple. Virtual environment entities and other components can be configured at run time. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach on several examples of experiments and tools which were realized in VRECKO.

2007

Applications in the fields of virtual and augmented reality as well as image-guided medical applications make use of a wide variety of hardware devices. Existing frameworks for interconnecting low-level devices and high-level application programs include high-frequency event streaming frameworks as well as dynamically typed message passing systems. Neither of these approaches exploits the full potential for processing events coming from arbitrary sources and neither is easily generalizable. In this paper, we will introduce a new multi-modal event processing methodology that uses dynamically-typed event attributes for event passing between multiple devices and systems. The existing OpenTracker framework was modified to incorporate a highly flexible and extensible event model, which can store data that is dynamically created and arbitrarily typed at runtime. The software architecture that is introduced in this work provides multi-modal event streaming, network and file logging support, and the ability to merge separate event streams. Due to the implementation of a self-descriptive event serialization mechanism, the architecture does not put any constraints on new data types to be used within the library. The main factors impacting the library's latency and throughput were determined experimentally and the overall performance was shown to be sufficient for most typical applications. Several sample applications were developed to take advantage of the new dynamic event model that is provided by the library, thereby demonstrating its flexibility and expressive power.

Proceedings of the …, 2005

In this paper we present XVR, an integrated development environment for the rapid development of Virtual Reality applications. Using a modular architecture and a VR-oriented scripting language, XVR contents can be embedded on a variety of container applications. This makes it suitable to write contents ranging from web-oriented presentations to more complex VR installations involving advanced devices, such as real-time trackers, haptic interfaces, sensorized gloves and stereoscopic devices, including HMDs. Some case studies are also presented to illustrate the development processes related to XVR and its features.

ASCI 2007, Proceedings of the 13th annual conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, 2007

The implementation of interaction techniques in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications still poses a considerable challenge for developers. There are few tools, conventions and standards to rely on. This paper presents the design of a framework aimed at the separation of interactionspecific and domain-specific functionality of VR/AR applications. The goal is to alleviate the development of interaction techniques by providing generic, re-usable components.

2012 5th Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS), 2012

Traditionally, interaction techniques for virtual reality applications are implemented in a proprietary way on specific target platforms, e. g., requiring specific hardware, physics or rendering libraries, which withholds reusability and portability. Though hardware abstraction layers for numerous devices are provided by multiple virtual reality libraries, they are usually tightly bound to a particular rendering environment.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

While software developers for desktop applications can rely on mouse and keyboard as standard input devices, developers of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications usually have to deal with a large variety of individual interaction devices. Existing device abstraction layers provide a solution to this problem, but are usually limited to a specific set or type of input devices. In this paper we introduce DEVAL-an approach to a device abstraction layer for VR and AR applications. DEVAL is based on a device hierarchy that is not limited to input devices, but naturally extends to output devices.

2011

Traditionally, interaction techniques for virtual reality applications are implemented in a proprietary way on specific target platforms, e. g., requiring specific hardware, physics or rendering libraries, which withholds reusability and portability. Though hardware abstraction layers for numerous devices are provided by multiple virtual reality libraries, they are usually tightly bound to a particular rendering environment.