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.