Cherry-Picking RIS Functionality – Integration of Game and VR Engine Sub-Systems based on Entities and Events

Modern game engines provide a variety of high-end features and sub-systems which have made them increasingly interesting for AR/VR research. Here, it often is necessary to combine features from different sources. This paper presents an approach based on entity-event state decoupling and exchange. The approach targets the combination of sub-systems from different sources which simulate functionally coherent aspects of the virtual objects like physics, graphics, AI, or developer services like state editing. The approach decouples specific internal representations using a semantic description layer for identifiers, data types, and potential relations between them. We illustrate the main concepts using examples from the combination of the Unreal Engine 4, the Unity engine, and own research software and illustrate performance related aspects as a guideline for the choice of an appropriate transport layer.