| With the enhanced performance of modern personal computer systems, the acceptance and distribution of 3D and virtual environment (VE) applications have become more common. The first VE systems were single user systems, but now we can see that distributed VE (DVE) and CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) can open new areas of applications. Currently one of the most challenging areas of research in Virtual Reality is Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). It adds new dimensions to human-factors, networking, synchronization, middleware, object model acquisition and representation.; Some international standards have been developed that are very likely to make a major impact on CVE technology: the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and the High Level Architecture (HLA). Deriving from military-purpose simulations, DIS and HLA, however, have limitations on building large-scale general-purpose CVE applications. For instance, HLA ownership management only allows single participant to manipulate objects at any given time while providing meaningful real-time manipulation of a single object among multiple geographically distant users is essential for users performing collaborative tasks.; The mobile agent technology that has received a rapidly growing attention over the last few years overcomes these limitations and could be an effective solution to building large-scale general-purpose CVE applications. This research addresses the software architecture and techniques necessary to apply the philosophy of mobile agents to collaborative virtual environments. For this purpose, a mobile agent system called MAP is designed and implemented. MAP supports general-purpose CVEs, enables object dynamic introduction, joint-manipulation management and maximizes system flexibilities such as dynamic composition and task coordination that are applied for building a workload balanced interest management system. |
