Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments using Object Based Sharing

Abstract

Massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) are becoming increasingly
popular with millions of users. Commercial implementations typically
rely on a traditional client/server architecture controlling the virtual world state of
shared data at a central point. Message passing mechanisms are used to communicate
state changes to the clients. For scalability reasons our approach creates and
deploys MMVEs in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion. We use standard Java technology
implementing only a few basic data-centric operations for the management of our
distributed objects. Higher consistency models can easily be implemented using
these basic operations. Currently, we have implemented transactional consistency
offering convenient and consistent access to the shared scene graph. In this paper
we describe our basic object model and the prototype implementation TGOS (Typed
Grid Object Sharing). Furthermore, we discuss preliminary measurements with the
virtual world Wissenheim executed on top of TGOS.