5. Analysis of the VR System

Managing the physical simulation of textiles with haptic contact interaction for two force-feedback devices required to exploit multi-core processor architectures. But for an optimal benefit of those architectures it was required to separate the system into partly independent processes to run on separate cores. Although the simulation and the contact rendering is tightly coupled, a separation of the two functional parts was being made. By splitting the textile simulation into two simulation threads having their own geometry, it was possible to run the parts on individual processing units. These two threads responsible for their corresponding area of influence namely the global textile and the local contact, had to be synchronised as the local thread is running on a much higher rate than the other due to force-feedback rendering. Moreover, the geometry of the local simulation is only handling a small fraction of the textile thus being an incomplete physical model. The dynamic change of the local geometry imposed also timing problems difficult to handle as the computation time varies. In both threads the additional flexibility of the numerical computations utilising completely the power of the processor cores affected the timing as well.