A multi-user virtual environment system with extensible animations

Multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) systems integrate the technologies of virtual reality and distributed system to allow users to interact with each other in a realistic virtual environment. However, due to the inflexibility in the current message protocol design, most of these systems can only allow a user to trigger canned animations in a sequential manner. In order to enable more flexible avatar animations, we propose to use XML as the language to design message protocol and extensible animations. We modified an open source MUVE system called VNet and replaced its message protocol with XML-based structures. We have also designed three animation functions to illustrate the extensibility of animation specification: avatar motion synchronization, flexible animation scripts, and integration of animations at different levels. Several animation examples have been designed to demonstrate how these functions can be used to enrich avatar animations in a MUVE system. Categories and Subjec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: VRML
• Authors: Yi-Lin Liu, Tsai-Yen Li
• Keywords: Message Protocol, Multi-User Virtual Environments, Virtual Environments, VRML 2003