DIVER: A Distributed Virtual Environment Research platform

DIVER is the Virtual Environment software architecture library developed at the University of Virginia. It is similar to SGI's Inventor, but was developed specifically as a toolkit for creating Virtual Environments rather than for mouse-based applications. Like Inventor, DIVER was implemented on top of the SGI's GL library and provides a powerful hierarchical graphics database. Unlike Inventor, DIVER is distributed, divorcing the application computations from the rendering computations. DIVER runs the application on a remote CPU and transparently spawns asynchronous rendering processes onto one or more SGIs. DIVER extends the graphics database hierarchy by allowing programmers to perform graphics transformations in any other object's nested coordinate system, and by allowing the programmer to nest the virtual camera (viewpoint) anywhere in the hierarchy. DIVER has been active use for over a year by more than twenty researchers.<>