Using The Distribute Real-time Visual Generator To Implement The Tower Simulation System

Tower simulation system use the virtual reality technology to generate the real-time 3D graphics of the airport, this system has been used to train the people working on the control tower of the airport. we use the distribute realtime visual generator technology to build the virtual reality system based on PCs. we use this solution to implement the visual generation part of tower simulation, which can be used to replace the SGI workstation of the old version. According to the result of experiment, the system like this can use very low cost to arrive the performance of Graphics Workstation.The distribute system can gather the ability of many micro computers to arrive the performance of the huge computer. But the difficulties to implement the distribute system is clear, which include the cost of communication, data consistent, etc. For the Tower simulation system which should be real-time and interactive, these difficulties become stand out, added the consideration of cost and maintenance, we can not use some technology such as real-time operation system or reflective memory network, etc. So we should some effective algorithms to overcome these difficulties.This paper focus on how to use PCs to implement the distribute real-time visual generator which can be used in the Tower simulation system to replace the expensive graphics workstation. the visual generation part has been divided into visual server and visual client, we use Minicomputers different area rendering technology to generate a wide range 3D scene. we use some algorithms such as no buffer in clients to guarantee the real-time and interactivity of visual clients。The contents of this paper will be described in the following parts:In the first part, we introduce the aims, background and the components of the Tower simulation system.In the second part, we talk about how to generate the 3D graphics in the Tower simulation system. We introduce the 3D developing tools of MutiGen Creator and Vega and describe how to use them to make the 3D scene in the system.In the third part, we describe the issues that may occur when implement the distribute real-time visual generator and give the solutions to these issues. These issues are mainly about the synchronization among the distribute visual clients.In the forth part, we describe the details about the implementation of the tower simulation system which makes an example of distribute real-time visual generator. we talk about the implementation of visual server and visual client respectively. we also make a compare between the old version of Tower simulation system(using the graphics workstation) and the new version( using the distribute real-time vision generator).