Institute for Physical Research and Technology

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(515) 294-3045
iprtinfo@iastate.edu


Institute for Physical
Research and Technology

Iowa State University
2156 Gilman Hall
Ames, IA 50011-3110

IPRT Works for Iowa

Backgrounder

Contacts:
Carolina Cruz-Neira, VRAC, 515-294-5685; carolina@vrac.iastate.edu
Robert Mills, Public Affairs, 515-294-1113; rmills@iastate.edu

VR JUGGLER, AN OPEN SOURCE TOOL FOR VIRTUAL REALITY

Environment key to developing powerful, portable VR applications

VR Juggler is open source, virtual reality application development framework. It is the result of an active research project headed by Carolina Cruz-Neira, associate director of the Virtual Reality Applications Center and an associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Iowa State University. Development work on the tool is done by VRAC faculty, staff and students. 

Researchers, industrial companies and commercial software developers use VR Juggler to speed development of virtual reality applications, achieve optimal performance, and create software that runs on any combination of immersive technologies and computational hardware. Users include industrial companies, such as Deere & Co. and Procter & Gamble, as well as commercial software developers such as Intelligent Light. VRAC also has used the tool to create dozens of leading-edge VR applications. 

The tool provides developers with a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that abstract and simplify all interface aspects of application programming, including display surfaces, object tracking, selection and navigation, graphics rendering engines, and graphical user interfaces. An application written with VR Juggler is essentially independent of devices, computer platforms and VR systems. VR Juggler is scalable from simple desktop systems like PCs to complex multi-screen systems running on high-end workstations and supercomputers. It supports many VR system configurations, including desktop VR, head-mounted displays, CAVE™-like devices, and Powerwall™-like devices. 

VR Juggler achieves its goals with a growing set of generic programming tools. The suite provides a complete VR system abstraction in reusable, cross platform modular components. Each component is decoupled from the others so that the application includes only what it needs. The modules include: 

  • VR Juggler provides a platform for virtual reality application development. This component allows users to run an application on almost any VR system. VR Juggler acts as "glue" between all the other Juggler components.

  • Gadgeteer, a device management system that handles configuration, control, acquisition and representation of data from VR devices.

  • The VR Juggler Portable Runtime (VPR) provides the Juggler Project with an operating system abstraction layer. By using this abstraction, the process of creating cross-platform software is simplified. q Sonix, which provides simple audio sound objects on top of several audio APIs. 

  • JCCL, which provides a collection of configuration and performance monitoring tools for VR applications. 

  • Tweek, a portable GUI for applications. Development on VR Juggler began in 1996 and it was released as open source software in 1999. 

The source code for VR Juggler can be copied, distributed and modified under the GNU Lesser General Public License license. To download VR Juggler, or for more information, visit the VR Juggler Web site at http://www.vrjuggler.org. 

VRAC is actively creating tools to enable science, engineering, humanities and art disciplines to apply emerging technologies in visualization and computing to their areas of expertise. The center is home to approximately $10 million in contract research with leading industry and government organizations. VRAC is also playing a critical role in ISU's initiative to become a world leader in the burgeoning field of human-computer interaction. It is part of the Institute for Physical Research and Technology, a network of research and outreach programs at ISU. For more information, visit VRAC on the Web at http://www.vrac.iastate.edu.