The CAVE: audio visual experience automatic virtual environment
Communications of the ACM
VIS '97 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Visualization '97
Visualization Research with Large Displays
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
The HIVE: Hanover immersive virtual environment
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Virtual reality for small colleges
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The state of the art in Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Visualization software today often requires multiple screens or display devices. This additional screen space can offer many views into the same scene or provide an abundance of screen space for maximum display of information. There are many APIs in existence for development of software that can take advantage of multiple screens, however, few support development in a Windows environment (most are for some variant of the UNIX operating system). In addition the specialized hardware for which many of these APIs are designed is very expensive (these hardware systems can be priced at more than one million dollars). The standard Windows PC is extremely cheap in comparison, so there is a push in today's VR and visualization community to find PC solutions to hardware requirements. GLUT (Graphics Library Utility Toolkit) is a simple window manager and event-handler used by many institutions in conjunction with OpenGL for teaching introductory graphics programming. In this paper, I discuss GLUMM (Graphics Library Utility for Multi-Monitors) a GLUT-like API for development of multi-monitor applications on one PC with multiple graphics boards (or a single board with multiple heads) supporting OpenGL and running Windows 2000 or higher. I believe the step from single display graphics programming to multi-monitor applications is much easier when done with an API similar to that which students are taught in their first graphics course. GLUMM makes it possible to develop multi-monitor applications with little prior graphics programming experience, and for undergraduate students to get a feel for state of the art visualization software in small school settings.