Mory,M., Masik,S., Müller,R., Köppen,V.
Abstract:
Nontraditional displays just started their triumph. In contrast to traditional displays, which are plane and rectangular, they do not only differ in design and architecture; they also implicate different semantics and pragmatics in the rendering pipeline. We strive for a generic solution that couples legacy applications with nontraditional displays. In this paper, we present an architecture and a respective experiment, which exposes a proprietary virtual reality software to a 360 degree virtual environment. Therefore we introduce a rigorous master-slave design. The proposed architecture requires discussion of the following details: how to access a proprietary application's OpenGL stream; how to transmit the OpenGL stream efficiently in a clustered rendering setup; how to process the OpenGL stream for adaption to nontraditional display semantics; and how to deal with the arising code complexity, withal. Our design decisions are highly interdependent. The presented architecture overcomes limitations, which were implied by client-server design in earlier work. The proposed rigorous master-slave design is totally transparent to the client software, and reduces interdependencies between rendering software and rendering clusters. Thus, it inherently reduces network round trips and promotes the use of scalable multicast. Our architecture is tested in a reproducible experiment, which provides a qualitative proof of concept.