标题: Framework for 3D Interactive Applications on the Web [打印本页] 作者: 彬彬 时间: 2012-1-3 11:17 标题: Framework for 3D Interactive Applications on the Web 1 Introduction
Increasing capabilities of the latest web browsers have facilitated
the accessibility, interoperability and mobility of the web. Platformindependent
applications run directly through the web browser and
a minimal operating system on various devices. It is now possible
to develop complex computational environments including 3D
graphics directly using the web browser. Recently, the emergence
of the WebGL 3D graphics API’s . coupled with high performance
JavaScript engines, have shown many interesting variations in creating
new generation of applications in the web environment. The
WebGL accesses the GPU by the use of JavaScript language to
efficiently present high quality 3D graphics directly on the web
browser as it delivers text, pictures, and movie clips. An important
benefit of this technology is that there is no need to install any
additional software or plug-ins. In this paper, we introduce a web
browser-based software framework for 3D interactive applications
that include three essential modules: visualization, simulation and
hardware integration. It can be applied to various platform independent
applications that require 3D graphics technology, i.e. visualization,
computer animation, gaming, and medical simulation.
2 Our Approach
Our framework is built on JavaScript to maximize accessibility and
minimize specific platform dependence. The prototyping features
of JavaScript are exploited for modularization and encapsulation.
The framework design is based on modular structures of Software
Framework for Multimodal Interactive Simulations (SoFMIS) developed
at Rensselaer’s Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging
in Medicine (CeMSIM) [Halic et al. 2011].
The rendering module based on theWebGL has the following func-
e-mail: halict@rpi.edu
ye-mail:ahnw@rpi.edu
ze-mail:des@rpi.edu
tionalities: visualization of the scene, texture management, and
specifying material properties and lighting effects. It also includes
specialized shaders for various types of objects such as metal, soft
tissue, spark, and smoke. The simulation module is responsible for
physics simulation such as deformation or collision detection. It is
executed by means of pseudo threading in the main thread of web
browsers. The objects displayed in the web browser are represented
by the scene objects. The objects interacting with each other are dynamically
included in the same scene. A scene abstraction allows
efficient collection of the interaction objects, which increases the
performance by avoiding unnecessary computation especially for
collision detection and response. The hardware integration module
handles the incorporation of the various hardware interfaces including
haptic devices. Since hardware access is not allowed within the
web browser, a specific plug-in is implemented. When the simulation
is loaded, platform specific plug-in dynamic link library (DLL)
is installed on the client side. During the simulation execution, the
plug-in can be queried to access device information on position and
orientation.
Our framework provides interactive refresh rates during the rendering
and simulation of complex surgical scene on desktop PC in figure
1a and 1b. Development of efficient computational techniques
and further advances in software is expected to increase the performance.
Parallelization of the framework and support of GPU-based
computational technique usingWebCL will be considered as future
work.
Acknowledgments
Authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of
the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
of the National Institute of Health grant # 1R01EB005807,
