Making WAVES: On the design of architectures for low-end distributed virtual environments

Different hardware platforms are best suited for different tasks in simulating a virtual world. Any distributed virtual world must be prepared to support communication among a large and heterogeneous set of software and hardware devices. By developing a scalable environment for virtual worlds based on heterogeneous platforms, researchers can utilize existing hardware, and so can begin to do research without a large capital outlay. For these reasons, it is imperative to explore the architectural constraints placed on a virtual world by distribution and parallelism. The author examines what it means to distribute functionality such as simulation, interaction detection and messaging in a virtual world, how to "scale up" such a world, and how to deal with communication delays. The WAVES (WAterloo Virtual Environment System) architecture attempts to address these concerns