VirtualGL

A toolkit for displaying OpenGL applications to thin clients

VirtualGL is a library which allows most Linux OpenGL applications to be remotely displayed to a thin client without the need to alter the applications in any way. VGL inserts itself into an application at run time and intercepts a handful of GLX calls, which it reroutes to the server's display (which presumably has a 3D accelerator attached.) This causes all 3D rendering to occur on the server's display. As each frame is rendered by the server, VirtualGL reads back the pixels from the server's framebuffer and sends them to the client for re-compositing into the appropriate X Window. VirtualGL can be used to give hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities to VNC or other remote display environments that lack GLX support. In a LAN environment, it can also be used with its built-in motion-JPEG video delivery system to remotely display full-screen 3D applications at 20+ frames/second. VirtualGL is based upon ideas presented in various academic papers on this topic, including "A Generic Solution for Hardware-Accelerated Remote Visualization" (Stegmaier, Magallon, Ertl 2002) and "A Framework for Interactive Hardware Accelerated Remote 3D-Visualization" (Engel, Sommer, Ertl 2000.)