Avocado: a distributed virtual reality framework

We present Avocado, our object-oriented framework for the development of distributed, interactive virtual environment applications. Data distribution is achieved by transparent replication of a shared scene graph among the participating processes of a distributed application. A sophisticated group communication system is used to guarantee state consistency even in the presence of late joining and leaving processes. We also describe how the familiar data flow graph found in modern stand-alone 3D-application toolkits extends nicely to the distributed case.