Adaptive scene synchronization for virtual and mixed reality environments

Technological advances in virtual environments facilitate the creation of distributed collaborative environments, in which the distribution of three-dimensional content at remote locations allows efficient and effective communication of ideas. One of the challenges in distributed shared environments is maintaining a consistent view of the shared information, in the presence of inevitable network delays and variable bandwidth. A consistent view in a shared 3D scene may significantly increase the sense of presence among participants and improve their interactivity. This paper introduces an adaptive scene synchronization algorithm and a framework for integration of the algorithm in a distributed real-time virtual environment. In spite of significant network delays, results show that objects can be synchronous in their viewpoint at multiple remotely located sites. Furthermore residual asynchronicity is quantified as a function of network delays and scalability.