This little chap was developed by my QUT Cubelab colleague Warwick Mellow. Ultimately "Peppino" will be a huge digital puppet which can be controlled (via rag-doll physics) by an audience using their iphones as a virtual cross-bar.

However, in this test I'm simply using "Peppino" to test synchronous rendering of an animated character across 4 independent hosts. The point of the excercise is to demonstrate the ability to render a 3D scene, at full resolution, across a large display wall. This "test wall" runs at a total resolution of 4320*3840, however the final wall will be 12960*7680. This is obviously to large to render a complex real-time, interactive scene, on a single host - thus the need for distributed real-time rendering.

For this test each host is driving two displays. The top four displays are projectors (two per host). The bottom four displays are 46inch touch surfaces (two per host). The trick then is to drive 4 isolated "views" of a single scene, across 4 independent machines, with off axis frustums. In particular this test is to ensure that the animation is driven at exactly the same rate on each host. Extempore's strong timing is great for this and ensures that we don't need to pass any network traffic (other than time sync) between hosts. In theory this means that we can potentially just keep on scaling up!

Horde3D, which is integrated into Extempore, is doing a fantastic job of rendering here, it's a great little light-weight engine that doesn't get in the way. Everything looks a little crap in this mobile phone video but really looks great running in our Lab.