Distributed virtual reality for everyone - a framework for networked VR on the Internet

The success of VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— which has established as the standard for 3D data on the Internet, shows that virtual reality is no longer limited to research labs but will become a part of every-body's life. Although VRML has just made its first steps from a static scene description language to an interactive VR specification, the realization of distributed virtual reality for everyone will only be the next step. In this paper we will introduce a network architecture to support multiuser virtual environments on the Internet. The key issues of our approach as realized in our current prototype are scalability and interactivity. For that reason we consider a worldwide distribution, a large numbers of participants and the composition of very large virtual worlds.