SIGGRAPH '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Information Retrieval
IEEE Transactions on Computers
High-performance spatial indexing for location-based services
WWW '03 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web
Q+Rtree: Efficient Indexing for Moving Object Databases
DASFAA '03 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications
A Network Architecture for Remote Rendering
DIS-RT '98 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Distributed Interactive Simulation and Real-Time Applications
Main Memory Evaluation of Monitoring Queries Over Moving Objects
Distributed and Parallel Databases
SINA: scalable incremental processing of continuous queries in spatio-temporal databases
SIGMOD '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Game traffic analysis: an MMORPG perspective
NOSSDAV '05 Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
A generic framework for monitoring continuous spatial queries over moving objects
Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Traffic characteristics of a massively multi-player online role playing game
NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Supporting frequent updates in R-trees: a bottom-up approach
VLDB '03 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 29
Quantitative analysis of visibility determinations for networked virtual environments
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
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Newly emerging game--based application systems such as Second Life1 provide 3D virtual environments where multiple users interact with each other in real--time. They are filled with autonomous, mutable virtual content which is continuously augmented by the users. To make the systems highly scalable and dynamically extensible, they are usually built on a client--server based grid subspace division where the virtual worlds are partitioned into manageable sub--worlds. In each sub--world, the user continuously receives relevant geometry updates of moving objects from remotely connected servers and renders them according to her viewpoint, rather than retrieving them from a local storage medium. In such systems, the determination of the set of objects that are visible from a user's viewpoint is one of the primary factors that affect server throughput and scalability. Specifically, performing real--time visibility tests in extremely dynamic virtual environments is a very challenging task as millions of objects and sub-millions of active users are moving and interacting. We recognize that the described challenges are closely related to a spatial database problem, and hence we map the moving geometry objects in the virtual space to a set of multi-dimensional objects in a spatial database while modeling each avatar both as a spatial object and a moving query. Unfortunately, existing spatial indexing methods are unsuitable for this kind of new environments.The main goal of this paper is to present an efficient spatial index structure that minimizes unexpected object popping and supports highly scalable real--time visibility determination. We then uncover many useful properties of this structure and compare the index structure with various spatial indexing methods in terms of query quality, system throughput, and resource utilization. We expect our approach to lay the groundwork for next--generation virtual frameworks that may merge into existing web--based services in the near future.