Language-Level Support for Exploratory Programming of Distributed Virtual Environments

We describe COTERIE, a toolkit that provides languagelevel support for building distributed virtual environments. COTERIE is based on the distributed data-object paradigm for distributed shared memory. Any data object in COTERIE can be declared to be a Shared Object that is replicated fully in any process that is interested in it. These Shared Objects support asynchronous data propagation with atomic serializable updates, and asynchronous notification of updates. COTERIE is built in Modula-3 and uses existing Modula-3 packages that support an integrated interpreted language, multithreading, and 3D animation. Unlike other VE toolkits, COTERIE is based on a set of general-purpose parallel and distributed language concepts designed with the needs of virtual environments in mind. We summarize the requirements that we identified for COTERIE, describe its implementation, compare it with other toolkits, and provide examples that show COTERIE's advantages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: UIST
• Authors: Blair MacIntyre, Steven Feiner
• Keywords: Distributed Shared Memory, Shared Objects, Software Engineering, UIST 1996, Virtual Environments