Q: What is involved in "porting over" existing applications to VR Juggler?

Suppose you create scenes using performer or other software like Maya or Max, can you provide a high level summary of what might be involved in running these apps in an immersive environment which uses VR Juggler. I realize Alias and studiomax would have to do this porting over of their software, but what are some of the topics/things that they have to do. Or a more simple question is, if you create models/scenes using SGI's !OpenGL Performer, do you have to rewrite what you wrote in VR Juggler environment? To make sure I am understanding the information from the different docs (docs are extremely well written), VR Juggler allows you to manage your immersive environment by providing different environments to manage sound, clusters, input devices etc. You just have to rewrite you original app say for example like a 3dmodel (if not originally written using VR Juggler) to make it VR Juggler compatible.

A: Understand how the concepts of the existing software architecture apply to VR Juggler.

The VR Juggler Programmer's Guide contains two chapters that outline how to port applications from the CAVElib^{<font size="-2">TM</font>} software and from GLUT. They are titled "Porting to VR Juggler from the CAVElib^{<font size="-2">TM</font>}" and "Porting to VR Juggler from GLUT" respectively. The common thread of these two chapters is the understanding of how concepts in GLUT (for example) can be translated and re-applied within the scope of VR Juggler. The same technique can be applied to other software architectures such as using !OpenGL Performer directly.

Existing code can be reused in a newly written VR Juggler application object, and with enough effort, it is possible to write an application that can be compiled to execute standalone or on top of VR Juggler. In general, though, most of the code written will probably be for interaction with the graphics, and that is likely to need VR Juggler-specific code. For example, reading data from a tracker is done differently in VR Juggler than in, say, World Toolkit. The idea of using position data to transform the graphics in some way is the same, though.

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