Locales: Supporting Large Multiuser Virtual Environments

  • Authors:
  • John W. Barrus;Richard C. Waters;David B. Anderson

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1996

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.03

Visualization

Abstract

People have a natural desire to make multiuser virtual environments large in spatial extent, in number of objects, and in number of users interacting with the environment. However, doing this brings up several problems, among them efficiently managing the flow of large amounts of data among many users, representing precise position and velocity information about objects arrayed across a large volume of space, and allowing designers to create parts of a virtual environment separately and combine them together later. Locales provide an efficient solution to these problems by breaking up a virtual world into chunks that can be described and communicated independently.