A System Architecture for Flexible Rendering Back-ends in Distributed Virtual Reality Applications

We describe an approach to integrate multiple rendering back-ends under a common application layer for distributed systems. The primary goal was to find a practical and non-intrusive way to use potentially very different rendering back-ends in heterogeneous computing environments without impairing their strengths and without burdening the back-ends or the application with details of the cluster environment. Our approach is based on a mediator layer that can be plugged into the OpenSG infrastructure. This design allows us to elegantly extent OpenSG's low-level multithreading and clustering capabilities to our system. It also allows us to sync incremental changes very efficiently. We demonstrate results and problems with two case studies.