We describe the Scene‐Graph‐As‐Bus technique (SGAB), the first step in a staircase of solutions for sharing software components for virtual environments. The goals of SGAB are to allow, with minimal effort, independently‐designed applications to share component functionality; and for multiple users to share applications designed for single users.This paper reports on the SGAB design for transparently conjoining different applications by unifying the state information contained in their scene graphs. SGAB monitors and maps changes in the local scene graph of one application to a neutral scene graph representation (NSG), distributes the NSG changes over the network to remote peer applications, and then maps the NSG changes to the local scene graph of the remote application. The fundamental contribution of SGAB is that both the local and remote applications can be completely unaware of each other; that is, both applications can interoperate without code or binary modification despite each having no knowledge of networking or interoperability.

Artists and illustrators can evoke the complexity of fur or vegetation with relatively few well-placed strokes. We present an algorithm that uses strokes to render 3D computer graphics scenes in a stylized manner suggesting the complexity of the scene without representing it explicitly. The basic algorithm is customizable to produce a range of effects including fur, grass and trees, as we demonstrate in this paper and accompanying video. The algorithm is implemented within a broader framework that supports procedural stroke-based textures on polyhedral models. It renders moderately complex scenes at multiple frames per second on current graphics workstations, and provides some interframe coherence. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.3: Computer Graphics: Picture/Image Generation; line and curve generation; bitmap and frambuffer operations; I.3.5 Computer Graphics: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling: curve, surface, solid, and object representations; I.3.7: Three-Dimens...

Through the use of particular visual effects, we provide a low latency user experience, even when extremely large latencies occur in an application.We demonstrate these effects in a wide-areadistributed virtual reality application.These effects include the use of motion blur, transparency, and defocusing.While the effects incur a performance penatty, the penalty is predictable, unlie the lag induced by network delays.Thus, we provide immediate feedback to each participant even when the network prevents information more useful than the fact that delays are occurring.When updates are finally receiv~we use the same effects to provide coherent updates to the user's information, without the jarring discontinuities that otherwise would confuse a participant's understanding of the environment.