高性能3D图形卡的发展使得基于PC集群的高分辨率沉浸式虚拟现实(VR)环境开始普及。通过对OpenGL渲染流水线的并行性分析和研究,提出并实现了一个并行虚拟现实开发平台(PVRDP)体系结构,并对平台的关键实现技术,如分布式场景树管理、负载平衡、离屏渲染、渲染资源管理等进行了研究,该平台基于普通PC集群和千兆局域网实现了海量多边形模型的实时并行渲染、输出图像的融合与校正处理。应用表明,PVRDP能够显著降低各类虚拟现实应用系统的开发复杂度,可支持低成本、高性能的沉浸式VR环境。
Along with the development of commodity 3D graphics card, the PC clusters supporting immersive high resolution virtual reality environment become more and more popular. To rapidly develop immersive VR application for PC cluster, the system structure and work flows of PVRDP (Parallel Virtual Reality Development Platform) were proposed and implemented based on the analysis of OpenGL rendering pipeline, and the key technology was studied, such as distributed scene graph management, load balance, rendering offline, rendering resources management and so on. Based on PC clusters and Gigabit network, PVRDP supports real-time rendering of huge dataset, output-image composition and rectification. The experimental results show that PVRDP can observably simplify the development of VR applications based on PC clusters.