Work Period 1996 – 1998

During this period I was working as a Research Engineer SRI International, Menlo Park, CA.

SHARE

I spent the majority of my time at SRI working on Share. Share was project that was funded by a Korean research company, called ETRI. Nat Bletter wrote the initial proposals and designed the API. I helped develop the graphics part of the API.

The following is an abstract from a paper we wrote. The paper was written in LaTeX, and I don’t have an easy way at the moment to generate complete downloadable version. So I’ll just post the abstract, which gives a flavor for what Share was about:

“In this paper we discuss the design and analysis of, Share, a shared
virtual environment toolkit based upon a novel client-server
architecture. In this system the three-dimensional virtual world
(scene database) is distributed among several servers. A two-tiered
hierarchy for server-to-server connectivity allows mapping of server
domain to the spatial characteristics of the scene database or to
network topology. We implement multiple connection services for
optimal message delivery. Messages are classified as to the critical
nature in which they must arrive and the appropriate network protocol
is used. Share provides multimedia capabilities by supporting standard
3D formats such as VRML and supplying users with the ability to transmit
audio and video streams. The Share Library is implemented using
standard cross-platform libraries such as OpenInventor, OpenGL, and
the Standard Template Library (STL).”

Share abstract

As mentioned in the abstract, we used OpenInventor. Shown below is a snapshot from the Share as it was running with one other user (somebody connected from a machine who’s network address was Crazypete.ai.sri.com to Shotgun.ai.sri.com). You can see that the interface used a modified OpenInventor viewer window, with some Motif User interface components.