A network architecture supporting consistent rich behavior in collaborative interactive applications.
Network architectures for collaborative virtual reality have traditionally been dominated by client-server and peer-to-peer approaches, with peer-to-peer strategies typically being favored where minimizing latency is a priority, and client-server where consistency is key. With increasingly sophisticated behavior models and the demand for better support for haptics, we argue that neither approach provides sufficient support for these scenarios and, thus, a hybrid architecture is required. We discuss the relative performance of different distribution strategies in the face of real network conditions and illustrate the problems they face. Finally, we present an architecture that successfully meets many of these challenges and demonstrate its use in a distributed virtual prototyping application which supports simultaneous collaboration for assembly, maintenance, and training applications utilizing haptics.
Marsh
James
J
School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, UK. james.marsh@manchester.ac.uk
Glencross
Mashhuda
M
Pettifer
Steve
S
Hubbold
Roger
R
D003142:Communication; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014584:User-Computer Interface