MVisio: a multi-device 2D/3D graphic engine for PDAs, PCs and CAVEs

1. MVisio: a multi-device 2D/3D graphic engine for PDAs, PCs and CAVEs 3D Mental Vision Achille Peternier, Ph. D. Student VRLab, EPFL, Switzerland

2. Plan • Foreword… • Goals of the Mental Vision project • MVisio Graphic Engine

3. Foreword… • Mental Vision is a long term on-going project: these are the first results • MVisio is a graphic engine and it is a part of the Mental Vision project • Let me introduce this project goals with an example…

4. Foreword… “You enter a toy-store, looking for the new version of your favorite videogame. You find the game, you turn the box to read what the content should look like and what you find is…”

5. Foreword… “DirectX 10 compatible! 4 GB of textures! 10 km x 10 km environment! 1kk of triangles per frame! Real-time this, pixel shader that, etc…” Ok, but… what about the game??

6. Foreword… • It’s like finding on the back of a book, instead of the summary or the author’s biography, something like: • 1.321.324 words! • 24 chapters! • Made with recycled papers! • 400 pages! • 53 occurrences of the word “occlusion”! Ok… But, what about the content??

7. Foreword… • Back to CG: today, in most of cases, users have to follow the rule: • I have this hardware configuration -> I can access this 3D content (games, VE, …) • I don’t have this hardware configuration -> I can’t access this content • Making a 3D content so strictly depending on a specific technology limits the fruition and the freedom of the content itself: • Reduces the potential application scenarios of your content • Reduces the number of potential users • Briefly, binding content with technology so tightly that they can only be used on an extremely specific hardware configuration or device creates monsters…

8. Foreword… Content Technology

9. Goals

10. Goals (long term overview) • This project aims to let authors (artists and programmers) to create virtual contents in a way less closed and limited to a specific hardware configuration or device • The Mental Vision will let you define an abstract virtual content and the technology itself will adapt it for you, in order to fit the device and context you actually want to use to access it

11. Goals Textures 3D models Virtual content Physics Semantic descriptors Shaders Audio Mental Vision

12. MVisio Graphic Engine

13. MVisio graphic engine • The first available element of this project is a graphic engine • MVisio (Mental Vision) is a lightweight, robust and user-friendly graphic engine developed originally for pedagogical purposes in our laboratory • MVisio brings high-quality real-time 3D graphics on heterogeneous devices (PDAs, PCs and CAVEs) • The user doesn’t have to modify his/her code: MVisio exposes an unified and common interface

14. MVisio graphic engine • MVisio reduces the lines of code to write to obtain results and the complexity of the code itself, by automatically optimizing the models and the scene-graph, managing the resources, auto-tuning the performances, etc. • Extremely useful when you want to create cross-device applications • MVisio simplify the import of 3D content through a powerful plugin for 3D Studio Max: with just one button click, the whole content displayed in 3D Studio Max is exported to a file directly loaded by MVisio (“wysiwyg-like”)

15. MVisio graphic engine 3D Studio Max MVisio application .MVE (MVisio Entity file format) Our exporter

16. MVisio graphic engine • Technically spoken, MVisio is: • Built in C++ on the top of OpenGL, OpenGL|ES and SDL (Simple DirectMedia Library) to handle context initialization and keyboard/joystick/mouse events • Just a 250 KB DLL • Capable to display a complex textured scene with dynamic lighting and shadows in just 7 lines of code

17. MVisio graphic engine #include <mvisio.h> #pragma comment(lib, "mvisio.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "sdl.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "sdlmain.lib") int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { MVISIO::init(NULL); MVNODE *bar = MVISIO::load("bar.mve"); MVISIO::clear(true, true, true); MVISIO::begin3D(NULL); bar->pass(); MVISIO::end3D(); MVISIO::swap(); _sleep(5000); MVISIO::free(); return 0; } Initialize MVisio (NULL means auto-setup) Load the scene exported from 3D Studio MAX Clear buffers, start a 3D rendering, tell MVisio to render the bar entity, execute the rendering, swap back to front buffer Free resources

18. MVisio Graphic Engine • MVisio is a modern 2D/3D graphic engine featuring: • Extremely user-friendly API, based on an C++ class-oriented architecture • Multi-device rendering on PC, PDA and CAVE, without changing the source code • Full OpenGL and OpenGL|ES support • Dynamic scene graph management • Dynamic lighting and real-time shadows • Vertex and pixel shaders • Skinning and animations • Particle emitters • Terrain engine • Loading of scenes directly exported from 3D Studio MAX through a specific plugin • 2D GUI system with event handling • Loading of GUI from XML files • Object picking • Support for Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) • New customizable objects directly pluggable to the MVisio core

19. MVisio Graphic Engine Models (.mve) Animations (.mva) User application (.exe) CAVE engine Mvisio (.dll) PDA engine PC engine OpenGL|ES (1.0 CM) client/server architecture OpenGL (1.1->1.5) Wall Wall Wall Wall Images

20. MVisio on PDA

21. MVisio on PC

22. MVisio on CAVE

23. MVisio graphic engine

24. MVisio graphic engine • More details on http:/vrlab.epfl.ch/~apeternier

25. Thanks! …questions?