DWTP: a basis for networked VR on the Internet

Shared virtual worlds are one of today's major research topics. While limited to particular application areas and high speed networks in the past, they become more and more available to a large number of users. One reason for this development was the introduction of VRML (the Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which has been established as a standard of the exchange of 3D worlds on the Internet. Although a number of prototype systems have been developed to realize shared multi-user worlds based on VRML, no suitable network protocol to support the demands of such environments has yet been established. In this paper we will introduce our approach of a network protocol for shared virtual environments: DWTP--the Distributed Worlds Transfer and communication Protocol. We will show how DWTP meets the demands of shared virtual environments on the Internet. We will further present SmallView, our prototype of a distributed multi-user VR system, to show how DWTP can be used to realize shared worlds.