VR Juggler—Open Source Virtual Reality Tools

Open Source Virtual Reality
The VR Juggler project was started in 1997 by Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira and a team of students at Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center. This ongoing work has produced a freely available open source, community-oriented virtual reality application development framework. VR Juggler is released under the GNU LGPL and will always be available for anyone and everyone to use free of charge.

In November 2003, Infiscape Corporation began offering commercial support and services for users of VR Juggler. Since then, Infiscape Corporation has assumed responsibility for maintaining, improving, and stabilizing VR Juggler to ensure its usability in production environments. Faculty and students at the Iowa State University Virtual Reality Applications Center perform research-oriented and long-term visionary work to keep VR Juggler on the cutting edge of virtual reality technology.

VR Juggler
VR Juggler is a collection of technologies which provide the tools necessary for VR application development. VR Juggler allows a user to run an application on almost any VR system. It acts as "glue" between all the other Juggler components. From this, VR Juggler provides a virtual platform for virtual reality application development.

"Code Once, Experience Everywhere"
VR Juggler is scalable from simple desktop systems like PCs to complex multi-screen systems running on clusters or on high-end workstations and supercomputers. The flexibility of VR Juggler allows applications to execute in many VR system configurations including desktop VR, HMD, CAVE™-like devices, and Powerwall™-like devices. The portability of the VR Juggler code ensures that any operating system can be used. VR Juggler 2.0 supports IRIX, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

Applications that use Juggler technology are highly flexible, run on many operating systems, and support many I/O devices. Juggler applications have the unique ability to morph to any VR installation. The Juggler suite of tools provides a complete VR system abstraction in reusable, cross-platform, modular components. Each component is decoupled from the others, so that the application includes only what it needs.

Many Standalone Components
Many application domains outside of VR can also benefit from the modular design of the Juggler Suite of Tools.

The Juggler Suite provides:

• the VR Juggler virtual platform,
• a device management system called Gadgeteer (local or remote access to I/O devices),
• a standalone generic math template library,
• a portable runtime that provides cross-platform thread, socket, and serial port primitives,
• a simple sound abstraction called Sonix,
• a distributed model-view-controller implementation called Tweek,
• and an XML-based configuration system with multivariate types.

Architecture Overview
The following diagram shows the layered architecture of the Juggler Suite and pieces of the foundation upon which it is built: