A Generic Virtual Reality Software System's Architecture and Application

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) systems utilize additional input and output channels in order to make interaction in virtual environments (VEs) more intuitive and to increase the user’s immersion into the virtual world. When developing VR applications, developers should be able to focus on modeling advanced interaction and system behavior instead of rendering issues. Many systems and tools for developing virtual reality applications have been proposed to achieve this goal. However, no de facto standard is available. In this paper we present Virtual Reality VRS (VR2S), a generic VR software system, which is an extension of the high-level rendering system VRS. The system provides flexibility in terms of the rendering system and the user interface toolkit. Thus, with using VR2S rendering can be performed with several low-level rendering APIs such as OpenGL, Render- Man or ray-tracing systems, and the interface can be implemented by arbitrary user interface toolkits to support both desktop- and VR-based interaction. The proposed system meets the demands of VR developers as well as users and has demonstrated its potential in different planning and exploration applications.