A Tool to Aid the Development of Distributed Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract

Highly immersive Virtual Reality applications are often complex and demand a lot of computational resources. To meet these demands, it is common to distribute the application execution over multiple computers connected through a data network. Although there are several tools for developing distributed applications, only a few are designed for VR applications. Thus, this paper presents a software tool to aid the development of distributed VR applications. This tool provides flexible features to data exchange and synchronization among processes using simple elements similar to those found in traditional programming languages. This tool uses the publisher/subscriber concept to reduce the coupling among processes and optimize the use of the network. Two applications have been developed using the proposed tool, proving its effectiveness.