Multi-User, Interactive Virtual Reality via the Internet

This thesis presents solutions to many of the problems associated with large-scale, widely distributed virtual reality, based on an architecture of heterogeneous devices and limited publically accessible bandwidth. The emphasis is on achieving multiuser , interactive virtual reality via the Internet, which inherently involves the associated problems, due to the nature of the Internet. The order of the discussion will be to first present a taxonomy of possibly scalable architectures based on their communication topology and data distribution. The next section will give an overview of related work in this field. Following on from this will be sections dealing with the problems involved with shared worlds of this nature and their possible solutions based on the author's research. A final architecture will then be presented which encompasses these solutions. Finally, it will be discussed how to interface the architecture with VRML(the Virtual Reality Modelling Language) which has become the standard virtual world description language over the Internet.