Collaborative virtual environments are rapidly gaining in popularity for the implementation of intuitive workspaces and networked gaming environments. Primary challenges that have to be addressed by these systems are maintaining systemwide data consistency, enabling fair resource sharing and interaction between users, and compensating network latency jitters. This paper investigates two major concurrency problems -(1) fair request handling and (2) systemwide data consistency. A global timestamp-based approach is presented in combination with different implementation models. Both centralized and decentralized approaches to achieving systemwide consistency and fairness are analyzed. To improve the scalability of the approach, hierarchical models are discussed. Implementation of a proof-of-concept system based on a high-level object-oriented real-time programming scheme called TMO is presented.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.