[其它] Framework for 3D Interactive Applications on the Web

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发表于 2012-1-3 11:17:25 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

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,

#5R01EB010037, #1R01EB009362, and #2R01EB005807.

References

HALIC, T., VENKATA, S., SANKARANARAYANAN, G., LU, Z.,

AHN, W., AND DE, S. 2011. A software framework for multimodal

interactive simulations (SoFMIS). In MMVR18.