Application Migration in Collaborative 3D Workspaces

This work focuses on a architecture allowijg sharing of multiple applications that run in a distributed 3D workspace. Applications are nodes in a distributed shared scene graph. We have implemented dynamic configuration management based on application migration between participating hosts and a spatial model of locales allowing dynamic workgroup management. In the following paper we describe the platform and a number of experimental workspaces that demonstrate the use of these configuration management techniques:

D. Schmalstieg, G. Reitmayr, G. Hesina:
Distributed Applications for Collaborative Three-Dimensional Workspaces
Technical report TR-188-2-2002-14, Vienna University of Technology (PDF).

The following links video figures accompaning the submission of the paper 'Distributed Applications for Collaborative Three-Dimensional Workspaces' for the IEEE VR 2002 Conference Special Issue of PRESENCE.

• Migration Full Video (36 Mb, asf). A single video containing all video figures. This file is in Windows Media format.
  Migration Full Video in QuickTime (120 Mb, mov). This file is in QuickTime format.

• 1 - migration and interaction (asf (6.6 Mb), mov (5.4 Mb)). This part shows interaction with a simple painting application and migration of the application by drag and drop.

• 2 - mobile collaboration (asf (5.6 Mb), mov (4.5 Mb)). This part shows how two mobile users manage visibility of their applications by moving them in and out of a public locale. The background image is the view of mobile user 1, while the inserted image in the lower right corner is the view of mobile user 2.

• 3 - panorama display (asf (5.1 Mb), mov (4.2 Mb)). A larger display built from three monitors shows several applications. The applications are shared only by hosts that need to be aware of them for rendering and are manipulated using markers.

• 4 - portable window (asf (5.7 Mb), mov (4.6 Mb)). A laptop computer is used as a portable window into locales running applications. The applications are migrated to the laptop as needed.

• 5 - remote collaboration (asf (6.7 Mb), mov (5.4 Mb)). Applications migrated to another host are still shared over small distances.

• 6 - persistent storage (asf (6 Mb), mov (5 Mb)). Applications are started by moving their respective markers into an area rendered by a certain host.