Remote Hybrid Rendering (RHR) can composite 2.5D imagery rendered remotely with locally rendered data. This is useful to
The data structures for the RHR protocol are defined in <rhr/rfbext.h>.
Its implementation consists of two parts, a server-side (remote) plug-in (VncServer) and a client-side (local) plug-in (RhrClient) for COVER, the VR renderer of the visualization system COVISE [http://www.hlrs.de/covise] and Vistle [https://vistle.io]. For sort-last parallel rendering, VncServer can be combined with CompositorIceT.
It is also compatible with Vistle's ray caster render module DisCOVERay.
Depth images can be optionally compressed with a lossy algorithm similar to Direct3D texture compression (cf. DepthQuantize), also on the GPU before read-back.
This work was funded by the EU within the project CRESTA [http://cresta-project.eu] and by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg within the projects bwVisu [http://bwvisu.de] and bwVisu2.