SURVEY ON VISIBILITY AND DATA DISTRIBUTION IN DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

The importance of data distribution increases in Multi-User Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) in parallel to both the complexity of virtual scenes and the number of clients. Main challenges are to load the relevant part of the scene, estimate and render visible primitives by keeping the frame rate fluent, since each user sees different part of the shared scene. In order to achieve the frame rate goal, data distribution should be well managed and optimization approaches based on network and visibility should be applied according to the requirements of each DVE. This is substantially handled by considering the area of interest for each user and estimating visible primitives as early as possible. This paper surveys the research on visibility culling, data management based on area of interest in DVEs and consequently summarizes thirteen implementations in the literature.

[1]  Timo Koskela,et al.  Occlusion Based Message Dissemination Method in Networked Virtual Environments , 2013, 2013 Seventh International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Apps, Services and Technologies.

[2]  Julien Perret,et al.  Remote interactive walkthrough of city models , 2003, 11th Pacific Conference onComputer Graphics and Applications, 2003. Proceedings..

[3]  Frédo Durand,et al.  A Survey of Visibility for Walkthrough Applications , 2003, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[4]  Alan Heirich,et al.  iRun: Interactive Rendering of Large Unstructured Grids , 2006 .

[5]  Roger Zimmermann,et al.  Edge indexing in a grid for highly dynamic virtual environments , 2006, MM '06.

[6]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  Accelerated occlusion culling using shadow frusta , 1997, SCG '97.

[7]  Rynson W. H. Lau,et al.  CyberWalk: a web-based distributed virtual walkthrough environment , 2003, IEEE Trans. Multim..

[8]  Anthony Steed,et al.  Frontier Sets: A Partitioning Scheme to Enable Scalable Virtual Environments , 2004, Eurographics.

[9]  Seth J. Teller,et al.  Temporally coherent conservative visibility , 1999, Comput. Geom..

[10]  Graham Morgan,et al.  Interest management middleware for networked games , 2005, I3D '05.

[11]  Joëlle Thollot,et al.  Conservative visibility preprocessing using extended projections , 2000, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Carla Maria Dal Sasso Freitas,et al.  Smart visible sets for networked virtual environments , 2002, Proceedings. XV Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

[13]  Jeffrey S. Steinman,et al.  DATA DISTRIBUTION MANAGEMENT IN THE HLA Multidimensional Regions and Physically Correct Filtering , 1997 .

[14]  Herman Arnold Engelbrecht,et al.  A Survey of State Persistency in Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[15]  Hansong Zhang,et al.  Effective occlusion culling for the interactive display of arbitrary models , 1998 .

[16]  Cláudio Fernando Resin Geyer,et al.  A3: A Novel Interest Management Algorithm for Distributed Simulations of MMOGs , 2008, 2008 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications.

[17]  Anthony Steed,et al.  Supporting scalable peer to peer virtual environments using frontier sets , 2005, IEEE Proceedings. VR 2005. Virtual Reality, 2005..

[18]  Katherine L. Morse,et al.  Interest Management in Large-Scale Distributed Simulations , 1996 .

[19]  Carlo H. Séquin,et al.  Visibility preprocessing for interactive walkthroughs , 1991, SIGGRAPH.

[20]  Steve Pettifer,et al.  Visibility-based interest management in collaborative virtual environments , 2002, CVE '02.

[21]  Cláudio T. Silva,et al.  The Prioritized-Layered Projection Algorithm for Visible Set Estimation , 2000, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[22]  Gavin S. P. Miller,et al.  Hierarchical Z-buffer visibility , 1993, SIGGRAPH.

[23]  Jörg Kienzle,et al.  Comparing interest management algorithms for massively multiplayer games , 2006, NetGames '06.

[24]  Seth J. Teller,et al.  Real-time occlusion culling for models with large occluders , 1997, SI3D.

[25]  Elvis S. Liu,et al.  Interest management for distributed virtual environments , 2014, ACM Comput. Surv..

[26]  Seth J. Teller,et al.  Communication visibility in shared virtual worlds , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE 6th Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises.

[27]  Shun-Yun Hu,et al.  FLoD: A Framework for Peer-to-Peer 3D Streaming , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[28]  Roger Zimmermann,et al.  Quantitative analysis of visibility determinations for networked virtual environments , 2012, J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent..

[29]  Jingzhi Guo,et al.  A Survey of P2P Virtual World Infrastructure , 2012, 2012 IEEE Ninth International Conference on e-Business Engineering.

[30]  Daniel Cohen-Or,et al.  Visiblity Streaming for Network-based Walkthroughs , 1998, Graphics Interface.

[31]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  A novel data distribution management scheme to support synchronization in large-scale distributed virtual environments , 2005, IEEE Symposium on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems, 2005..

[32]  Reuven Bar-Yehuda,et al.  Geometric algorithms for message filtering in decentralized virtual environments , 1999, SI3D.

[33]  Peter Wonka,et al.  Visibility in Computer Graphics , 2003 .

[34]  Michael Kass,et al.  Error-bounded antialiased rendering of complex environments , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[35]  Cláudio T. Silva,et al.  Visibility-based prefetching for interactive out-of-core rendering , 2003, IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics, 2003. PVG 2003..

[36]  Thomas A. Funkhouser,et al.  RING: a client-server system for multi-user virtual environments , 1995, I3D '95.

[37]  Vlastimil Havran,et al.  Hierarchical visibility culling with occlusion trees , 1998, Proceedings. Computer Graphics International (Cat. No.98EX149).

[38]  Dieter Schmalstieg,et al.  A Network Architecutre for Remote Rendering , 1998 .

[39]  Shun-Yun Hu.  Spatial Publish Subscribe , 2009 .

[40]  Gwendal Simon,et al.  A survey of peer-to-peer overlay approaches for networked virtual environments , 2015, Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl..

[41]  Abdennour El Rhalibi,et al.  A Survey of AoIM, Distribution and Communication in Peer-To-Peer Online Games , 2012, 2012 21st International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN).

[42]  Edwin Earl Catmull,et al.  A subdivision algorithm for computer display of curved surfaces. , 1974 .

[43]  Jihad El-Sana,et al.  Directional Discretized Occluders for Accelerated Occlusion Culling , 2000, Comput. Graph. Forum.