Click on the image to see a gallery of the various Virtual Reality applications in use at the University of Siegen.

All applications are based on Equalizer, and most of them use head tracking and a flight stick for interaction. The architectural walk-through is using OpenSceneGraph.

We’ve been busy working on a new performance feature for Equalizer: Dynamic Frame Resize (DFR).

DFR automatically adapts the size of the rendering to achieve a constant framerate, which works very well for fill-limited applications such as eVolve. Of course, true to our mix-and-match strategy, it can also be combined with other scalable rendering features.

Enjoy:

A new version of the compositing library ParaComp was just released. Old-timers might remember this library as PICA.

Most notably, this release adds the necessary hooks for Equalizer, and Equalizer 0.6 will use Paracomp on Linux for alpha-blending. Right now this is the only mode where Paracomp is faster than the Equalizer default implementation, but I’m sure more will be added over time.

Kudos to the ParaComp team!

The Equalizer source tree now contains support for DPlex decompositions. This was the last scalable rendering feature missing, which means that the client library is now 1.0-ready. Yeah!

But fear not, we’ve got plenty in store for the following Equalizer releases leading to the 1.0. And even after version 1.0 we have plenty of features and optimizations in store to push the boundaries of scalable rendering performance.

I’ll now test and fix some corner cases of DPlex, like multi-level decompositions, before the 0.6 release. For normal DPlex mode, the feature is already working well, see for yourself:

In the near future there are two events where you can get a live Equalizer demonstration.

The first one is IEEE Vis next week in Columbus, OHIO. Max from the University of Zurich will give demonstrations in the Interactive Demonstrations Lab.

The second one is Siggraph Asia in December, where Renato Pajarola is contributing to the Interactive Massive Model Rendering course.

Feel free to pass by and talk to us!

Below is the next video – Pixel-based decomposition:

And another video, 2D load-balancing with eVolve:

Here is the next Equalizer video – Database decomposition with eVolve:

On the right there’s a simple timeline of the most important toolkits for parallel rendering, naturally with more details for Equalizer.
I plan to extend this over time, and maybe even creating one with the major hardware milestones.
Any input is welcome – Skywriter VGXT, anyone?

Equalizer just got something new for all you ray-tracing and volume rendering people out there: Pixel compounds. The load is always almost equally distributed, thus allowing to scale the fill-rate nearly linearly.

The frustum for the source channels gets distorted so that the channel only renders 1/nth of the pixels in one dimension. Afterwards the frustum is moved slightly to select the ’starting’ point of the channel.

OpenGL functionality which is influenced by the raster position will not work correctly with pixel compounds, or needs at least special attention. Among them are: lines, points, glRasterPos, glPolygonStipple.

On the right you’ll see an image of it in action. The backgrounds are colored differently for illustration purposes. Click on the image for a high-res version.