World Distribution Protocol for Support of Scalable General Purpose Distributed Virtual Environments

Abstract

General purpose distributed virtual environments (DVEs) require more rigorous architecture design than those of case specific environments. Several world distribution methods have been developed for specific usage in various vehicletraining simulators. The VPMS project at the University of Windsor is concerned, in part, with investigating strategies for design and implementation of a system, which adapts existing world distribution protocols for general purpose DVEs. In context of these protocols, the world is partitioned based on physical proximity in the virtual world; databases for a given part of the world are established and maintained locally. One obstacle that needs to be overcome is the size difference of the area of influence (AOI) of a given entity. Since AOI size varies for different entity types, as occurs in aircraft training involving group based entities, existing schemes which fix AOI size are inappropriate to deal with the issues and requirements of modem, distributed modelling, visualization and collaboration contexts and, therefore, new schemes must be developed. Some approaches to this problem are described and design considerations for a general-purpose system are discussed.