Shared 3D Virtual Worlds

This paper outlines ongoing research into shared 3D Virtual Worlds at the Communications Research Centre, (CRC) Ottawa, Canada.

We will introduce the concept of a shared virtual world, and describe our work, and in particular, the use of Linux and Open Source Software within this work.

Interest in shared virtual worlds has been evident for some years, notably in the development of Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and the High Level Architecture/Run Time Infrastructure (HLA/RTI) by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Department of Defense. Concurrently, VRML has emerged as a platform-independent approach for the 3D web, and in parallel, methods to share such a virtual world are being developed.

To contribute to the development of shared VRML, CRC has undertaken to migrate the VNet Interchange Protocol (VIP) from a client-server based infrastructure to a peer to peer one based on multicasting. Additionally, CRC have implemented this on open-source platforms, and have supplemented the VNet work by augmenting shared virtual worlds with Spatial Audio.

John Stewart

John is currently employed as a Computer Network Researcher at the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada. His work revolves around Multicast Technologies, IPv6, and Linux.

He is currently the maintainer of "FreeWRL", a VRML viewer for Linux; he is also the author of "MultiMON", a Multicast Network Monitoring program.

Some previous employment opportunities led him to New Zealand (Sun Microsystems) and to The Netherlands/Belgium (Canadian Embassy, and Belgacom), as well as around the Ottawa area (Mitel, Gandalf and Siltronics)

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