Distributed and Collaborative
Synthetic Environments

The goal of the Shastra research project is providing a substrate of geometric data structures and algorithms which allow the distributed construction and modification of a synthetic environment, efficient querying of objects attributes, collaborative interaction with the environment, fast computation of collision detection and visibility information for efficient dynamic simulation and real-time scene display. In particular, we address the following issues:

Geometric and Graphics Support

Ageometric framework for modeling and visualizing synthetic environments and interacting with them. Some of the problems we are investigating are:

• Space Decomposition & Search Structures
  • Regular Triangulations & History DAGS
  • Octree Deompositions & Binary Search Trees
  • Convex Decompositions & Partitioning Search Trees
• Model Construction
  • A-patch smoothing
  • Smooth reconstruction from unorganized points
  • Reconstruction from Slices
  • Volume Modelling
• Toolkits
  • Ganith
  • Shilp
  • ISMA
• Collision Detection
• Interrogative Visualization

Distribution and Collaboration Support

A distribution and collaboration substrate that supports construction, modification and interaction with synthetic environments on networked desktop machines.

• Distribution Support
  • Kernels
  • Object communication
• Collaboration Support
  • Session Management
  • Floor Control
  • Access Regulation
  • Constraint Management

Synthetic Environments

Some of the applications areas for which we are building Synthetic Environments are:

• Air/Land/Sea Defense
• Human Body Walkthrough
• Molecular World
• Networked Learning Spaces
• Economic Visualization

Distributed and Collaborative Synthetic Environments Papers

C. Bajaj, F. Bernardini. "Distributed and collaborative synthetic environments". In Human-Computer Interaction and Virtual Environments, in NASA Conference Publication, Hampton, Virginia, April 1995. NASA.

 

C. Bajaj, F. Bernardini. S. Cutchin, R. Merkert"A CSCW Framework for Networked Multimodal Synthetic Environments". Technical Report CSD-TR-96-078, Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, November 1996.

 

Web Based Collaboration Aware Synthetic Environments C. Bajaj, S. Cutchin Proc. of TeamCAD Gvu/Nist Workshop on Collaborative Design May 1997, ed. J. Rossignac, pg 143- 150

Scientific and Multimedia Toolkits C. Bajaj, Pacific Graphics 95, Seoul Korea, 1995

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