Omnipresent Collaborative Virtual Environments for Open Inventor Applications

Thispaper presents a library for collaborative virtual environments that willenable developers to extend their standalone 3D applications into thecollaborative virtual environment applications without many efforts. The collaborativevirtual environment applications usually put many extraordinary consistencyproblems on developers. Many of these problems are related to distributedsystems and parallel processing. Most of them are already taken care in thelibrary presented in this paper. To show usability and make programming with thelibrary even easier, it was integrated as the extension into the Open Inventor.As a result, all Open Inventor applications can now benefit from collaborationwith other applications. Many of them require just few lines of changes totheir sources to get robust collaboration; compared to hundreds lines of codeof hand-made solution that will give just simple collaboration without anyconsistency guaranties.