The Distributed Interactive Virtual Environments-architecture and applications

The Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) is an experimental software platform for the development of multi-user virtual reality applications. A large number of users and applications can participate and interact with each other in the same virtual environment even though they may be geographically dispersed. Several user-related abstractions have been introduced to ease the task of application and user interface construction. The work concentrates on the following topics: the peer-to-peer distribution model enables the construction of multi-user, multi-application environments, different from many client/server approaches; user-related `higher level´ concepts, such as vehicles, visors and object behaviors-given these tools, application designers may easily construct interactive VR applications