Building and Supporting a Large-Scale Collaborative Virtual Environment

The COVEN project's London Travel application demonstrates several techniques that enable large-scale virtual environments. By large-scale we mean both geometrically complex environments and support for many simultaneous participants in the world. The demonstrator is concerned with travel to a virtual model of London, where participants can plan routes, investigate tourist information and meet with fellow travellers or guides. In this paper we discuss how the Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) platform has been extended to meet the application requirements. In particular we shall discuss the technical problems involved in maintaining and rendering a scene database many times larger than one might usually encounter.

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