Distributed Physical Based Simulations for Large VR Applications

We present a novel software framework for developing highly animated virtual reality applications. Using a modular application design, our goal is to alleviate software engineering issues while yielding efficient execution on parallel machines. We target worlds involving numerous animated objects managed by physical based simulations. Mixing rigid objects, fluids, mass-spring or other deformable objects leads to complex interactions between them. Today no unified simulation algorithm with a reasonable complexity is available to manage all these types of objects. We propose a framework for coupling and distributing existing algorithms. We reuse and extend the data-flow model where an application is built from modules exchanging data through connections. The model relies on two main classes of modules, animators and interactors. Animators are responsible for updating objects’ states from forces applied to them. These forces are computed in parallel by interactors using the objects’ states they receive from animators. The network interconnecting modules can be progressively optimized. From a simple fully connected network enforcing a synchronous semantics, it can evolve towards an active network able to implement a bounding volume based dynamic routing or an asynchronous data re-sampling. As a result, we present an application managing interactions between rigid objects, mass-spring objects and a fluid. It is executed in real-time on a 54 processors cluster driving 5 cameras and 16 projectors for user interactions.