Interactive virtual reality on the grid

The grid has received a substantial amount of interest (and funding) over the past few years, even though the majority of grid applications are still batch-oriented. For this reason, extensions to grid middle-ware are a basic necessity to advance the idea of the grid into new application domains. The glogin tool and its integration into the Grid Visualization Kernel (GVK) yield both, interactivity and visualization, into the grid. While glogin enables the tunneling of arbitrary interactive traffic in and out of the grid, GVK offers transparent visualization services for grid applications while exploiting the grid's performance for time-consuming visualization tasks. In this paper, the utilization of glogin and GVK is demonstrated for Virtual Reality (VR) environments. Two distinct approaches for VR, using either abstract visualization objects or video streams, are explained, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of each.