Collaborative Virtual Environment: Web‐Based Issues
Qingping Lin, Liang Zhang · Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering · 2007
Abstract With the exponential growth of the Internent in the past decade, it has evolved from a repository of information to an interactive digital social world. Interactive multimedia contents can be embedded into Web pages to enrich the information presented in the cyberspace for enhanced social and business applications. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) function as a new type of interface that attempts to model the Internent into a real social world using the power of Internent communication and virtual reality. For Web‐based three‐dimensional (3‐D) interactive CVEs, due to the heterogeneous nature of the Internet, the most challenging issues of system scalability, virtual world database delivery, and consistent world states maintenance across all participants should be addressed with efficient protocol and data communication architecture incorporating with appropriate virtual world partition, content delivery, and world states synchronization methods if it is intended for use by a large number of concurrent users over the Internent. In this article, we discuss the existing standards, methods for constructing Web‐based CVEs, and popular solutions to the Web‐based CVE issues.