MAGE-VR: A Software Framework for Virtual Reality Application Development

In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of MAGE-VR, a modular, highperformance software framework for developing virtual reality (VR) applications. MAGE-VR excels in developing highly realistic and interactive virtual environments (VE) by wrapping the specialized functionality of mature third-party libraries into one cohesive package. MAGE-VR is flexible because it allows the user to choose the libraries that are used to provide the underlying functionality through its plug-in architecture. The framework is extensible because it provides the means for the user to use their customized libraries with the framework. We also demonstrate that MAGE-VR significantly outperforms Java3D [8] and adds very little overhead to the libraries it encapsulates. The source code is freely available under the GNU Lesser General Public

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