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

Abstract

Building a distributed virtual environment thatscales 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. Thispaper describes our overall architecture that enablesus to build such a wide area shared virtual environment targeted to the Internet. The architecture relieson spatial partitioning of the shared scene to reducecommunication, replication to hide latency, and groupcommunications to maintain replica consistency. Thispaper discusses the generic architecture, the key issuesthat must be solved and then presents two implementations of that architecture and gives performance resultsfrom one of those implementations.