Extending a distributed virtual reality system with exchangeable rendering back-ends

We present an approach to integrate multiple rendering back-ends under a common application layer for distributed systems. The primary goal was to find a practical and nonintrusive way to use potentially very different renderers in heterogeneous computing environments without impairing their strengths and without burdening the back-ends or the application with details of the cluster environment. Our approach is based on a mediator layer that handles multithreading, clustering, and the synchronization between the application’s and the back-end’s scene. We analyze the proposed approach with an implementation for a state-of-the-art distributed VR/AR system. In particular, we present two case studies and an example application.