Extending Locales: Awareness Management in MASSIVE-3

Locales (as first embodied in the SPLINE system) are a very good approach to constructing and organising large virtual environments, especially for distributed and multiuser systems. In the MASSIVE-3 system we have adopted the locale approach, and extended it in a number of significant areas: we have integrated the notion of awareness (drawing on our previous work with awareness management in virtual environments); we have added support for abstractions, i.e. simplified or alternative representations of locales or sets of locales; we have integrated data management based on functional and organisation factors; and we have introduced a flexible and general framework for defining dynamic locale selection policies. This paper describes our approach, illustrates our current implementation with a sample application (a virtual sports arena), and gives a qualitative evaluation of our approach to locales.