Research On Collaborative Mechanism In DVE Based On Jini

Collaborative working system in Distributed Virtual Environment is the combination of distributed computing, Web and Virtual Reality, and has become an important development trend of network, multimedia, Virtual Reality and CSCW. It not only supports the collaborative work of geographically distributed people, but also provides more realistic, immersive collaborative working environment for multi-users.Current research of the domestic and foreign focus less on the collaborative mechanism and methods of the group collaborative work, and the systems developed were relatively special-purpose, and didn't provide a general software support for the important and common collaborative mechanism in DVE applications, which drastically decreased the reusability, extensibility and scalability of the applications. According to the development requirements, this paper adopts Jini to implement a Collaborative Service based on AO, which provides a general support for the collaborative mechanism in DVE, and simplifies the development of DVE application systems.Firstly, we propose to develop a Collaborative Service in DVE of Jini based on AO paradigm, because OO has some disadvantage comparing with AO in the application development in DVE. We also extract the characteristic properties of the collaborative applications in DVE, and modularize these properties as separate Aspects.According to the function requirements and performance requirements, we separate the Collaborative Service into three core modules, and implement both synchronized and asynchronized group communication, interactive collaboration, and collaborative awareness with these modules.In this paper, we adopt concurrent control algorithm based on token to assure the consistency when multi-users operate on the same shared resources.Finally, the Collaborative Service will be joined into Jini, and becomes a facility of Jini. In this way, users of platform can use the Collaborative Service to develop collaborative applications which meet special demand. In order to test the support of the Collaborative Service of DVE applications,we use the Collaborative Service to develop a virtual classroom collaborative application, which includes group communication based on text among teacher and students, cooperative editing teacher's documents among students, and the collaborative awareness between teacher and students. This system is deployed in our lab LAN, and the results shows that the Collaborative Service can effectively support the development of collaborative applications.