Extending VRML to Support Collaborative Virtual Environments

In this paper we will give a short overview of the areas where VRML —the Virtual Reality Modelling Language— has to be extended in order to support collaborative virtual environments on the Internet. We will present extensions which allow an adequate representation of the individual participant within the virtual world. We will show how our approach supports shared interactions and behaviours, and the necessary mechanisms to keep distributed virtual worlds consistent while minimizing the network traffic at the same time. Finally we will introduce our networked architecture based on state of the art network technology as a basis for scalable shared virtual worlds, potentially populated by hundreds or even thousands of users.