Workload balancing in distributed virtual reality environments

Virtual Reality (VR) has grown to become state-of-theart technology in many business- and consumer oriented E-Commerce applications. One of the major design challenges of VR environments is the placement of the rendering process. The rendering process converts the abstract description of a scene as contained in an object database to an image. This process is usually done at the client side like in VRML [1] a technology that requires the client’s computational power for smooth rendering. The vision of VR is also strongly connected to the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) as the perceived realism is subject to an interactive frame rate ranging from 10 to 30 frames-per-second (fps), real-time feedback mechanisms and realistic image quality. These requirements overwhelm traditional home computers or even high sophisticated graphical workstations over their limits. Our work therefore introduces an approach for a distributed rendering architecture that gracefully balances the workload between the client and a clusterbased server. We believe that a distributed rendering approach as described in this paper has three major benefits: It reduces the clients workload, it decreases the network traffic and it allows to re-use already rendered scenes

A Survey on Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems for Adverse Weather Conditions

Adverse weather conditions involving diminished visibility through rain, snow, fog and reduced traction as a consequence of rainy, snowy, and icy surfaces have been a major cause for traffic accidents throughout the EU in recent years. In conjunction with deficient speed adjustments and improper headway control on the part of the driver, they represent one of the chief causes for traffic accidents in Europe. Intelligent vehicle safety systems (IVSS) have the potential to improve traffic safety. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the state of the art of existing technologies and research for IVSS on the European level and to draw conclusions on the remaining challenges. It will furthermore analyze how a joint deployment of IVSS and paradigms such as car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication can further improve the safety