OpenSG: Basic Concepts

One of the main shortcomings of current scenegraphs is the inability to support multi thread-safe data. Another area that leaves things to be desired is extensibility. This work describes a system that allows multiple asynchronous threads to independently manipulate the scenegraph without interfering. This demands replication of data. As scenegraph data can get very big, a distinction of structural and content data is introduced, and a method to replicate the latter only if necessary. To make the whole concept generic and easily extensible, Reflectivity is introduced to the system. Besides allowing to manage multiple independent threads the described approaches can also be used for generic scenegraph access ,e.g. for loader/writer and GUIs. An extension allows also to the use the developed methods for cluster support.