Intel Labs released two new open source software packages: a distributed scene graph package to increase the maximum number of participants in 3-D Web applications, such as virtual worlds, by more than 20 times, and an advanced offline ray tracing package to accelerate the rendering of photorealistic images on Intel-based systems by 100 percent.

Scalable Virtual Environments

Virtual environments have applications from gaming to disaster response training. However, today's approach typically limits each environment to running on only one server. Intel researchers have developed a new software architecture called the Distributed Scene Graph (DSG) that breaks the environment into separately executable components, which, when combined with a cloud computing model, allows applications to scale user experiences far beyond existing limits.

The DSG architecture enables massive scaling of the number of participants and the complexity of scenes by making it possible to add as much hardware as needed to create animmersive experience.

To enable this, the DSG architecture separates the technologies bundled in the traditional "simulator in a box" architecture into discrete components, such as client management, physical simulation, script processing, and scene persistence.

Developers can download the source code here

Embree - Photo-Realistic Ray Tracing Kernels

Embree is a collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels, developed at Intel Labs. The kernels are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest Intel processors with support for the SSE and AVX instruction sets. In addition to the ray tracing kernels, Embree provides an example photo-realistic rendering engine.

Embree is designed for Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithms, where the vast majority of rays are incoherent. The specific single-ray traversal kernels in Embree provide the best performance in this scenario and they are very easy to integrate into existing applications.

The source code is available here.