RING: A Client-Server System for Multi-User Virtual Environments

This paper describes the client-server design, implementation and experimental results for a system that supports real-time visual interaction between a large number of users in a shared 3D virtual environment. The key feature of the system is that server-based visibility algorithms compute potential visual interactions between entities representing users in order to reduce the number of messages required to maintain consistent state among many workstations distributed across a wide-area network. When an entity changes state, update messages are sent only to workstations with entities that can potentially perceive the change { i.e., ones to which the update is visible. Initial experiments show a 40x decrease in the number of messages processed by client workstations during tests with 1024 entities interacting in a large densely occluded virtual environment. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: Computer Graphics]: I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism { Virtual Reality. Additi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SI3D
• Authors: Thomas A. Funkhouser
• Keywords: Client-server Design, Computer Graphics, SI3D 1995, Virtual Environments, Visual Interactions