Future Applications
A common theme in many of the points that have been made is that scene graph systems provide a way to leverage a number of resources. Future applications will likely be network-centric. In networked applications, a scarce resource that requires careful management is network bandwidth. Network latency and jitter must also be taken into account for some applications. One way to reduce the network bandwidth required for some graphics applications will be to adopt a position of requiring the client to do a lot of work. Specifically, a terse scene description consisting of a compact representation expands into a complete scene description on the client side, and the client contains tools that allow a user to navigate through a colorful, interesting and compelling three-dimensional scene.
As an example, the current e-commerce experience can be likened, in most cases, to a trip through the card catalogue at the local library. Access to information is good, but it is presented in list or tabular form. A more compelling and fun experience would be one that more closely matches the way people really shop: we browse and we make serendipitous discoveries. We are visual creatures. However, downloading a complete scene description of the local hardware store is beyond reasonable, not only from the perspective of network bandwidth, but also in terms my laptop's capabilities. A shopper can only see so much stuff at one time, and scene graph systems are a great framework for implementing view-dependent operations. Only those items that are close to me need to be loaded in my computer. The items on the other side of the store don't interest me at the moment, and they don't need to be transmitted to my computer. As I navigate through the store, the data that is needed for my local view can be requested and downloaded by the client on my laptop.
There are numerous scene graph systems available commercially as well as in the Open Source community. Of these, RM Scene Graph from R3vis Corporation in Novato, California. RM has been used in commercial products as well as in government research labs to tackle a wide variety of visualization and 3D graphics problems. Recently, R3vis announced the launch of OpenRM, an Open Source project based upon the commercial RM technology. It provides support for multipass rendering, including stereoscopy, a rich assortment of geometric and image-based primitives, is easily extensible, and runs on Unix and Win32 platforms.
RM and RM Scene Graph are registered trademarks of R3vis Corporation.
