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.<>