[PD] multiple_window feature of Gem?

[Mike Wozniewski]

B. Bogart wrote:
> The IDEAL solution would be a system that could take the RENDER data
> from the pixelTANGO gem-chains (well the whole context) pass the entire
> thing onto the multicast network and somehow dynamically build a copy of
> the pixelTANGO patch in a non-Gem host. That is you have a magic little
> application that just dynamically clones an exitsing GL context over
> network. Once we have the copy in the projector machine we can crop it
> for that projector, and apply the deformation grid. Of course references
> to pixel textures in memory, framegrabbers etc.. would not be
> interpreted propely. I don't see how chromium deals with this part of
> transporting the texture/video data...

Although I've just learned of Chromium, it sounds like it may be the ideal 
solution we're looking. From what I can tell, all that Chromium does is 
intercept openGL commands from arbitrary OpenGL applications, bundles them 
in a "stream", and passes them thru a 'Stream Processing Unit' (SPU) chain. 
At the OS-level, Chromium pretends that it IS the OpenGL library, hence it 
is transparent to the application.

Some side-notes:
-This means that Gem might not need to be modified at all (!) ...and it 
looks like Chromium supports pretty much all of standard OpenGL through 
version 1.5, which should be sufficient.
- There exists a Tilesort SPU. This distributes the stream to various 
machines, creating a tiled display (ie, each machine gets one tile to 
render). Furthermore, there is a non-planar version of Tilesort SPU where 
you can specify different viewing frustums for each machine - Perfect for a 
CAVE, or immersive environment! (see 
http://chromium.sourceforge.net/doc/nonplanar.html for more details).
- To answer your texture question: there's a distributed texture SPU... from 
the Chromium docs: "The idea is that a program can use write-mode to 
distribute texture image data on a rendering cluster the first time the 
program is run. Then, the second and subsequent runs can use read-mode to 
quickly read the texture data from the render servers, instead of passing it 
all through the Chromium tilesort SPU."
- I didn't see any mention of dynamic textures though :(  ...but if you're 
talking about video files that already exist on disk somewhere, then perhaps 
it's possible. See http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/%7Eprajlich/wall/ppb.html 
for an example of showing movies on a tiled wall display using Chromium.

I'm going to look into Chromium a bit more. We'll be in touch again sometime 
soon.

Cheers,
Mike Wozniewski

P.S. I've added one more person to the discussion: Jeremy Cooperstock, who 
is our project supervisor. I believe that some of you probably know each 
other already.