| Networked virtual reality environments including virtual worlds devoted to entertainment, online socializing and remote collaboration have grown in popularity with the rise of commercially available consumer graphics hardware and the growing ubiquity of the Internet. These virtual worlds are typified by a persistent simulated three-dimensional space that communicates over a computer network, where users interact with the environment and each other through digital avatars. Development of these virtual worlds challenges the limits of the networking infrastructure, 3D streaming graphics techniques, and the distributed computing design of the virtual world systems that manages the simulation. In this dissertation, we explore solutions to different aspects of the overall problem of developing a general purpose, networked virtual environment, focusing on the networking and software system issues. Specifically, we show how to improve the networking infrastructure to better support the high packet-rate traffic that is typical of virtual worlds, efficiently stream terrain data for remote rendering, and construct a dynamically adaptive distributed systems framework suitable for virtual world simulations. |
