DIVER: a Ustributed Virtual Environment Besearch Platform

DIVER is the Virtual Environment software architecture library developed at the University of Virginia. I t is similar to SGl’s InventorTM, but was developed spec$cally as a toolkit for creating Virtual Environments rather than for mouse-based applications. Like Inventol; DIVER was implemented on top of the SGl’s GLTM library and provides a powerful hierarchical graphics database. Unlike Inventol; DIVER is distributed, divorcing the application computations from the rendering computations. DIVER runs the application on a remote CPU and transparently spawns asynchronous rendering processes onto one or more SGls. DIVER extends the graphics database hierarchy by allowing programmers to per.$orm 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 in active use for over a year by more than twenty researchers.