Only Interface for Tiled displays or VR Cluster

Motivation:
Are you tired out getting Cromium working in your VR cluster? Are you tired of writing many script for just launch a specific application? Are you tired of thinking of distributing applications over tiled displays? Are you tired of setting up tired displays? Come to Oribi. Oribi is a really an application launcher in tiled displays. It will make your feel that the VR Cluster is a single super computer. Its goal is to make the complexity of the tiled displays transparent to the user. However, internally, it will still use Cromium, DMX, and others distribution software. The Plugable module (written in python) allows the user to use any distribution method. The interface will launch the application according to internal distribution method. The configuration is done through XML. You can also associate the extension with distribution method which basically allows the user to launch application by double click the icon.

Tiled display systems allow for the creation of large, high-resolution visualization displays with an affordable cost. This is done by tiling ordinary displays in a matrix, commonly called a display or power wall, with display controlled by a separate computer. The goal of tiled display research at UCLA/ATS has been to be able to run any software application that normally produces graphics, or a visualization, on a single computer/display combination and have it produce the same graphics over the entire tiled display. In doing so, we have experimented with a number of different applications that people who are working on tiled displays at other institutions have written. We will call these applications distribution programs as their purpose is to distribute the graphics created by other applications over the tiles, i.e., to do parallel rendering. Each different end-user application works with one or a few distribution programs dependent on factors such and the kind of graphics it employs.

The goal of Oribi is to create a single interface to the applications installed on a tiled display. It will allow the user to run any application on the tiled display and hide the fact that there are multiple distribution programs and the mechanisms of how to run each application and each distribution program from that user. Oribi makes an assumption that the user has no knowledge about the Unix commands involved. Furthermore, Oribi will allow the user to run a demo, where a demo is an application run using specific data and it will allow for the creation and running of presentations.

Oribi is open source and runs under Linux system. Oribi is designed to make it easy to add to any tiled display. It is configurable via ordinary text files which contain information about the tiled display setup, applications, distribution programs, demos, and presentations. This article discusses the design of Oribi.