The original goal of this work effort was to try to design a CAVE tool in such a way that it could be easily transferred to the desktop. The motivation was that such a design would allow quicker development as well as simpler maintenance. Essentially, both tools would share the same code base.
The bulk of the work dealt with finding consistent, cross-platform ways to deal with the user interfaces. This was achieved through the use of object oriented techniques, commonly referred to as design patterns.
From these design patterns, a prototype framework emerged. This framework is a step in the direction of allowing portable and extensible custom visualization tools to be developed more easily.
In addition to developing the framework itself, further work had to be done in order to integrate the vtk visualization library with the Performer rendering library. Since these are two popular toolkits, the work done to integrate them will be useful for other developers in the field of visualization.
Using the prototype framework, a CAVE tool and a desktop tool were developed. The two tools share the same code base and many of the same objects. In addition, a VRML server was created with components from the framework, facilitating web-based visualization. This demonstrated that elements of the framework are reusable.