11.5.3.1. Stereo Viewer
Warning
The dVRK stereo viewer and associated calibration tools are exclusively supported on ROS 2. ROS 1 is not supported.
The dvrk_display package provides a lightweight, pure C++ application designed to intercept, compose, and display stereo video feeds using native GStreamer elements. You can launch the viewer using the stereo (or mono) executable, for example: ros2 run dvrk_display stereo.
GStreamer Native Rendering & Low Latency
Using GStreamer directly provides dramatically lower latency compared to routing massive, high-definition stereo streams entirely through ROS architectures. At its core, the viewer constructs direct OpenGL hardware displays to drive the master console natively.
The architecture still provides immense modular flexibility by isolating separate viewer stages into distinct executables via unixfd inter-process video routing. Because unixfd strictly passes local descriptors natively, all video rendering and frame grabbing must be executed on a single, unified computer.
In addition to rendering the video feed natively, the viewer displays discrete icons and textual overlays to cleanly visualize the operational state of the overarching dVRK System Node within the master console. However, because the layout overlays depend strictly on lightweight data strings, the master dVRK system node can safely exist on an entirely separate remote computer—the viewer will naturally extract the console’s state seamlessly utilizing its integrated ROS 2 topic listener.