[PD] Chromium and Gem integration Q.

[Mike Wozniewski]

Well, as long as you have a fixed configuration during runtime, then yes 
chromium is transparent to the application. But, for cave-like setups 
that have head tracking and use off-axis projection to adjust the 
viewing frustums, you will need to put some chromium calls in the 
application. For example, see: 
http://chromium.sourceforge.net/doc/nonplanar.html

BTW, what kind of system are you guys building?

It sounds quite similar to our work. We (at McGill / SAT) are building a 
similar interactive/distributed rendering environment using Pd. We 
started last year with the Pd/Gem combination, but as we started to get 
more elaborate with our rendering engine, we looked to chromium to help 
with distribution over the network. It was a viable alternative, but in 
the end we decided to use a combination of Pd & OpenSceneGraph, and 
write our own world-coherence engine using a Pd-message based system and 
[netsend]. It works quite nicely. Much more flexibility in terms of 
rendering quality and graphical extensions than Gem, and you can 
maintain higher level control with the slave renderers. ie, the 
renderers still have knowledge of the world, and not just streamed 
openGL commands. This is essential is you want to do extra processing 
down the line (eg. shadow detection/removal, multi-projector blending, etc).

Cheers,
-Mike

> Ah, I was under the impression, applicaitons needed to be recompiled  
> to work with chromium. Not sure where I became under the impression.  
> I will give it a shot.
>
>> chromium is non-invasive.
>> this means that you do not have to do anything to either Gem nor  
>> chromium
>> to run Gem via a chromium-renderer.
>> this means: it (should) work "out of the box"
>