An Architecture for Virtual Worlds

This paper presents a system architecture for creating interactive, multisensory, three-dimensional environments called virtual worlds. The architecture specifically addresses the requirements of virtual worlds for high performance, flexibility, and coordination of concurrent events. Performance is enhanced by a distributed client/server system structure and by efficient overlap of processing time and input/output delay. All processes communicate via asynchronous messages. The functional partitioning of a virtual world requires relatively low bandwidth among the individual processes and the system can be implemented over a conventional local-area network. A key element of this architecture is a central, event-driven dialogue manager that coordinates concurrent input and output events. The dialogue manager provides a clear separation of the interaction techniques from the content of the virtual world as defined by the application. The system is flexible and easily reconfigurable. An interaction technique can be readily changed or replaced because each interaction device is modularized into a separate server and each interaction modality into a separate subdialogue. Subdialogues can be loaded and dropped dynamically, enabling input/output device remapping and the selection of interaction techniques while a virtual world is running. As an initial test of this architecture we have implemented a virtual world for interacting with data from a computational fluid dynamics simulation.