Metis - An Object-Oriented Toolkit for Constructing Virtual Reality Applications

Virtual reality systems provide realistic look and feel by seamlessly integrating three-dimensional input and output devices. One software architecture approach to constructing such systems is to distribute the application between a computation-intensive simulator back-end and a graphics-intensive viewer frontend which implements user interaction. In this paper we discuss Metis, a toolkit we have been developing based on such a software architecture, which can be used for building interactive immersive virtual reality systems with computationally intensive components. The Metis toolkit defines an application programming interface on the simulator side, which communicates via a network with a standalone viewer program that handles all immersive display and interactivity. Network bandwidth and interaction latency are minimized, by use of a constraint network on the viewer side that declaratively defines much of dynamic and interactive behavior of the application.