Issues in the design of a scalable shared virtual environment for the Internet

Abstract

Building a distributed virtual environment that scales to many participants in low bandwidth, high latency networks is a technical challenge. The key issues are maintaining acceptable performance in the face of high latency links, and maintaining consistency of shared world data between multiple participants. The paper describes the overall architecture that enables one to build such a wide area, shared virtual environment targeted to the Internet. The architecture relies on spatial partitioning of the shared scene to reduce communication, replication to hide latency, and group communications to maintain replica consistency. The paper discusses the generic architecture, the key issues that must be solved and then presents two implementations of that architecture and gives performance results from one of those implementations.