Communication visibility in shared virtual worlds

Though the service of shared virtual worlds is an active area of research, little effort has been made to optimize such systems for urban world spaces. Tracking the motion, action, and communication of thousands of users in a city requires an application of visibility for spatial and logical subdivision of updates. We propose the City-Level Optimizations for Virtual Environments (CLOVES) substrate for the MIT City Scan (automated urban geometry acquisition) project. CLOVES includes a generalized spatial subdivision optimized for visibility; a Graduated Visibility Set (GVS) generator; associated interest management techniques; and model service to distributed heterogeneous clients.