Section: Software and Platforms

Collaviz

Participants : Thierry Duval [contact] , Thi Thuong Huyen Nguyen.

The aim of Collaviz software (collaborative interactive visualization) is to allow to design, deploy and share collaborative virtual environments (CVE). Collaviz allows VR developpers to concentrate on the behavior of virtual objects that can be shared between users in a CVE. Indeed, Collaviz provides a software architecture that hides the network programmation details of the distribution and the synchronization of the content of the CVE, and that facilitates the coupling with the 3D graphics API used for rendering. Collaviz is written mainly in Java and is runnable on multiple hardware configurations: laptop or desktop computer, immersive room, mobile devices. The PAC-C3D software architecture of Collaviz makes it possible to use various 3D APIs for graphic rendering: Java3D, jReality, jMonkeyEngine, OpenSG, Unity3D (work in progress) and Havok Anarchy (work in progress), and also to use various physical engines such as jBullet and SOFA. The distribution over the network can be achieved using TCP or HTTP. An on-going collaboration with Triskell team intends to extend Collaviz using a Model Driven Engineering approach in order to provide high-level tools to generate a large part of java code of virtual objects.