Locales and beacons: efficient and precise support for large multi-user virtual environments

Abstract

There is a natural desire to make multi-user virtual environments large in spatial extent, in numbers of objects, and in numbers of users interacting with the environment. However, doing this brings up several problems: eficiently managing the flow of large amounts of data between large numbers of users, representing precise position and velocity information about objects that are arrayed across a large volume of space, and allowing designers t o create parts of a virtual environment separately and combine them together later.Locales are an eficient method for solving these problems b y breaking up a virtual world into compact chunks that can be described and communicated independently. I n addition, locales can be used to support a number of special effects that allow virtzal worlds to easily transcend reality.While having many benefits, locales introduce an. additional problem: finding something when you do not know whai locale it is in. This is solved b y the companion concept of beacons, which makes it possible t o find something no matter where it is.

Synchronisation for dynamic load balancing of decentralised conservative distributed simulation

“…As shown section 5, disparity among the load can have important consequences on the overall simulation time. A lot of research has been conducted to address this problem, leading to numerous algorithms including uniform and nonuniform space partitioning [33,23,2,32], graph partitioning [16,17] (some designed for specific tasks including road traffic partitioning [34,36]), car crashes analysis [29] and others.…”

SParTSim: A Space Partitioning Guided by Road Network for Distributed Traffic Simulations

“…Spline [10] decomposes the virtual space into various subdivisions called 'locales', which may have an arbitrary shape and may be linked together by arbitrary transformations. Each entity resides in exactly one locale, where the participant's interactions are limited to the current locale and its immediate neighbors.…”

Generating 3D interaction techniques by identifying and breaking assumptions

“…Because the set of potential assumptions is almost limitless, reducing the candidate assumptions to a manageable quantity is critical. The task, user, and hardware char- Space is linear and continuous Locales (Barrus et al 1996), head-butt zoom ) The visual properties of a space match the physical properties of a space Guided navigation (Galyean 1995), force fields (Xiao et al 1998) Appearance does not necessarily reflect reality View-based teleportation (Fisher 1989), flying into a WIM There is only one world Worlds within worlds (Feiner and Beshers 1990) Everyone in the world occupies the same point in time…”