A distributed 3D graphics library

Abstract

We present Repo-3D, a general-purpose, object-oriented library for developing distributed, interactive 3D graphics applications across a range of heterogeneous workstations. Repo-3D is designed to make it easy for programmers to rapidly build prototypes using a familiar multi-threaded, object-oriented programming paradigm. All data sharing of both graphical and non-graphical data is done via general-purpose remote and replicated objects, presenting the illusion of a single distributed shared memory. Graphical objects are directly distributed, circumventing the "duplicate database" problem and allowing programmers to focus on the application details. Repo-3D is embedded in Repo, an interpreted, lexically-scoped, distributed programming language, allowing entire applications to be rapidly prototyped. We discuss Repo-3D's design, and introduce the notion of local variations to the graphical objects, which allow local changes to be applied to shared graphical structures. Local variations are needed to support transient local changes, such as highlighting, and responsive local editing operations. Finally, we discuss how our approach could be applied using other programming languages, such as Java.