Croquet Based Virtual Museum Implementation with Grid Computing Connection

Abstract

A 3D computation technology in the form of Virtual Reality enables user to access ancient artifacts and facilitates the feel of presence. Virtual Reality consumes a lot of computing resources. Grid computing can be used to manage the distributed computation resources to perform computational processes Croquet application is used in this work to provide a virtual museum which will store an ancient Java manuscript. Croquet is a virtual machine which can be programmed for a collaborative 3 dimension application. The collaboration in virtual world can be conducted for multi users. In this work, we have created a virtual museum using a 3 dimension processing application support using 3D Studio Max. The Croquet application has been connected to a grid computing based on Globus and JOGL based manuscript system through Virtual Network Computing. A user acceptance test was conducted and the result indicated that the users where satisfied with the application performance, although Croquet is still rarely used despite its usefulness for Virtual Reality. The connection between the VR world and Globus based Grid Computing System for a 3D manuscript has successfully been implemented, despite of the slow processing in the system.