Hi all,
not really a new feature but worth knowing:
OpenSceneGraph has the ability to render the output from a VNC client as a texture onto any surface in the scene graph. This might come in handy to display foreign hardware output within 3d-cockpits.
Alex Perry had a session at LinuxTag 2010 showcasing the output of an Android using this technology. See his slides here.
I just succeeded to try it out by following his advice. I placed a tablet-pc like object into the Seneca's cockpit rendering the entire desktop of my Windows pc onto one surface. Here you can see FlightGear running on Linux with the VNC-output of FlightGear running on Windows (with VisualStudio and fg-sources in the background).
Currently only left-mouse-clicks are forwarded to the VNC session, so controlling the remote fg is barely possible. A nice usecase might be to run one of these full-featured Garmin simulators (like for the G1000) on one machine and present this in a 3d-glass cockpit.
Requirements:
[*]OSG source codes
[*]Apply Alex's patch from here
[*]Compile OSG
[*]Probably rebuild SimGear/FlightGear from source
[*]Create an object with texture named hostname.vnc where hostname is the hostname of the machine running the VNC server
[*]A VNC server like TightVNC