Using a rendering engine to support the development of immersive virtual reality applications

This work presents the features of a exible realtime 3D graphics engine aimed at the development of multimedia applications and collaborative virtual environments. The engine, called EnCIMA (engine for collaborative and immersive multimedia applications), enables a quick development process of applications by providing a high level interface, which has been implemented using the C++ object-oriented programming paradigm. Important characteristics of the engine are the integration of several real time graphics techniques needed by visualization applications; access to network connection management to support collaboration; 3D sound capability; the support to various specialized interaction equipments such as 3D mice, haptic devices, 3D motion trackers, data-gloves, joypads, force feedback joysticks, and; the capacity to have rendering computation and Physics simulation assigned to GPUs and PPUs, respectively. The engine also enables the developer to choose how the scene should be rendered to, i.e. using standard display devices, stereoscopy, or even several simultaneous projection for spatially immersive displays. As part of the evaluation process, we have compared the performance of EnCIMA to a game engine and two scene graph toolkits, through the use of a testbed application.