Locales and beacons: efficient and precise support for large multi-user virtual environments
- 1 January 1996
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
There is a natural desire to make multi-user virtual environments large in spatial extent, in numbers of objects, and in numbers of users interacting with the environment. However, doing this brings up several problems: efficiently managing the flow of large amounts of data between large numbers of users, representing precise position and velocity information about objects that are arrayed across a large volume of space, and allowing designers to create parts of a virtual environment separately and combine them together later. Locales are an efficient method for solving these problems by breaking up a virtual world into compact chunks that can be described and communicated independently. In addition, locales can be used to support a number of special effects that allow virtual worlds to easily transcend reality. While having many benefits, locales introduce an additional problem: finding something when you do not know what locale it is in. This is solved by the companion concept of beacons, which makes it possible to find something no matter where it is.Keywords
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- DIVE A multi-user virtual reality systemPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- The SIMNET virtual world architecturePublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- MUDs grow up: social virtual reality in the real worldPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- EM-an environment manager for building networked virtual environmentsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Exploiting reality with multicast groups: a network architecture for large-scale virtual environmentsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Portraying and Understanding Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments: Experience and Tentative ConclusionsPRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 1995
- BrickNet: A Software Toolkit for Network-Based Virtual WorldsPRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 1994
- An animated on-line community with artificial agentsIEEE MultiMedia, 1994
- Visibility preprocessing for interactive walkthroughsACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 1991
- Merging BSP trees yields polyhedral set operationsACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 1990