Physical Modeling for Interaction in Real-Time Simulation
Abstract
The goal of this project was to model objects in a simulated environment with a method
which allows physically-correct behavior to be calculated in real-time. Our approach
studied the interaction between differing object types and used object-oriented software
design to create a class hierarchy of objects suitable for interactive speed virtual
environment simulation. We studied physical modeling systems and constraint systems
as techniques to control the behavior of objects in our simulations.
We also studied two different ways to achieve distributed execution of an object-oriented
simulation. In our first approach, we designed a set of simulation software which ran
built on top of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel model for distributed computing. In our
second approach, we used a commercial product to handle the object distribution for us
without building this into our distributed application. Both examples demonstrate the
advantage of solving application-domain problems using the distributed object approach.