Section: Software

Imerse: Inria Multi-Environment Realistic Simulation Engine

Participants : Adrien David, George Drettakis.

In the context of the ADT Interact3D and the ARC NIEVE, we developed Imerse, a middleware to be used as a VR engine, helping in the implementation of realistic simulations for immersive installations. Imerse provides a wrapper to OSG's (OpenSceneGraph) deep scene graph and its traversals abilities into an abstracted collection of high level objects which directly represent realistic entities (such as indoor elements, machines and realistic characters). It provides capacities such as skeletal animations or spatialized audio by interfacing with APF, while its clear composite pattern allows implementing more behaviors easily.

Finally, a generic design based on triggers and functors lets the final user implement complex scenarios of VR applications with the feeling of writing a script in C++. Applications developed on top of Imerse plug transparently into osgVR developed in the DREAM group (i.e., the research support development group of our INRIA center). We are using osgVR to render OSG's scene graph in a distributed manner, since rendering clusters are available in an increasing number of installations. osgVR is a software layer developed by the DREAM research support group, ensuring synchronization and events/inputs distribution among a list of rendering slaves. These two libraries are available on GForge.