Today, scientists and engineers are exploring advanced applications and uses of immersive systems that can be cost-effectively applied in their fields. However, one of the impediments of the wide-spread use of these technologies is the extensive technical expertise required of application developers. A software environment that provides abstractions from specific details of hardware configurations and low-level software tools is needed to provide a common base for the prototyping, development, testing and debugging of applications. This paper describes VR Juggler, a virtual platform for the creation and execution of immersive applications, that provides a virtual reality system-independent operating environment. We will focus on the approach taken to specify, design, and implement VR Juggler and the benefits derived from our approach.

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The last advances in commodity hardware have allowed users of immersive visualization to create high-performance systems using a set of interconnected computers. These systems, called cluster computers, allow to employ high-quality graphics cards, high-speed processors and significant amounts of memory for much lower costs than would be possible with high-end, shared memory computers traditionally used for virtual reality purposes. In this paper we present ClusterJuggler, a system based on the VR Juggler architecture that enables the use of distributed and clustered computers for the display of immersive virtual environments. We provide and overview of the potential ways to synchronize a cluster for immersive visualization. Then, we describe the ClusterJuggler architecture in detail, and we show how ClusterJuggler allows virtual reality application developers to combine various existing clustering techniques to meet the needs of their specific applications. A performance evaluation of our clustered technique on real 3D real-time immersive applications demonstrates the efficiency of ClusterJuggler with respect to both number of nodes in the cluster and the bandwidth of the interconnection network system.

We describe a technique for supporting testing of the interaction aspect of virtual reality (VR) applications. Testing is a fundamental development practice that forms the basis of many software engineering methodologies. It is used to ensure the correct behavior of applications. Currently, there is no common pattern for automated testing of VR application interaction. We review current software engineering practices used in testing and explore how they may be applied to the specific realm of VR applications. We then discuss the ways in which current practices are insufficient to test VR application interaction and propose a testing architecture for addressing the problems. We present an implementation of the design written on top of the VR Juggler platform. This system allows VR developers to employ standard software engineering techniques that require automated testing methods.

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