Extending OpenSG for real-time synchronization of immersive environments in distributed collaboration

Immersive technology enables the creation of virtual working environments for geographically distant team members to meet up and work simultaneously on highly interactive tasks. This paper presents our method for the real-time synchronization of distributed systems sharing a virtual 3D scene. Therefore, we extended the OpenSG scene-graph library, which is using the change list paradigm to synchronize virtual scenes within a rendering cluster. Our approach is to adapt this paradigm for the synchronization between remote systems to enable simultaneous cooperative work in a shared immersive environment. The implemented method has been validated on a use case in which two participants were remotely collaborating while inspecting a production line imported from CAD. Our result can be used by Virtual Reality developers to add state of the art collaboration features to their applications like scene synchronization, user avatars and simultaneous interaction with the virtual environment.