Omnipresent collaborative virtual environments for open inventor applications

Abstract

This paper presents a library for collaborative virtual environments that will enable developers to extend their standalone 3D applications into the collaborative virtual environment applications without many efforts. The collaborative virtual environment applications usually put many extraordinary consistency problems on developers. Many of these problems are related to distributed systems and parallel processing. Most of them are already taken care in the library presented in this paper. To show usability and make programming with the library even easier, it was integrated as the extension into the Open Inventor. As a result, all Open Inventor applications can now benefit from collaboration with other applications. Many of them require just few lines of changes to their sources to get robust collaboration; compared to hundreds lines of code of hand-made solution that will give just simple collaboration without any consistency guaranties. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.