Synchronous collaborative systems for distributed virtual environments in Java

This paper presents a 3D-distributed virtual environment, which allows for the creation of applications to enable multiple users to collaboratively interact in, and communicate about, a virtual world. This virtual environment is used to primarily support a flight simulator application by providing communications routines and networking synchronisation between the client and the server. Four server–client synchronisation methods were developed and compared. The method of transparent synchronisation with non-blocking I/O has been found to be the best method for maintaining synchronisation among distributed virtual environments using Java. The successful creation of the distributed virtual environment and the positive results collected in the supporting experimental data, leads to the conclusion that Java, with the addition of the non-blocking I/O Java.NIO.channels API and the Java 3D API, can be successfully used to create high-performance distributed 3D-virtual environments.