Collaborative animation over the network

The continuously increasing complexity of computer animations makes it necessary to rely on the knowledge of various experts to cover the different areas of computer graphics and animation. This fact leads to increasing effort being put into research concerning cooperative working over the Internet. However, it still requires substantial effort and time to combine different animation techniques in a common virtual environment. When trying to perform collaborative animation over a network, we often face the problem of having to combine animation systems and applications based on different software and hardware and using incompatible data structures. We present an approach, based on a client-server architecture and employing a VRML based language as common interchange format, that allows inhomogeneous systems to be easily incorporated into a collaborative animation. The applications can be freed from employing plug-ins or libraries to link into a common animation platform; they keep a local copy of the global scene and only need the ability to export the internal data representation into the so called "PaVRML" language, the language used to exchange data and synchronize clients. This approach allows a number of practitioners to share their know-how within a common animation without requiring the huge amount of work necessary to port their application to a common platform. It also makes it possible in the first place to combine the capabilities of different animation systems into a single complex animation. We also investigate solutions to optimize the network load for real time applications. We present preliminary results and discuss the future developments of this ongoing work.