P2P-Based Avatar Interaction in Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments

The idea of the 3D Web as a global scale Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) currently is very popular and a lot of research work is done in this field. In the course of the HyperVerse project we have developed a two-tier Peer-To-Peer (P2P) architecture as basic infrastructure for a federated, open and scalable 3D Web. Our approach relies on a concept that incorporates a loosely-structured P2P network overlay of user clients and a highly-structured overlay that connects a federation of reliable server machines constituting a reliable backbone service. A central problem when intending to build a massive virtual online environment is how avatar interaction as well as tracking and provision of avatar positions can be realized in a globally scalable manner. This paper presents a hybrid avatar interaction scheme developed for HyperVerse that incorporates the user clients and the backbone service for avatar position tracking. The backbone is used as reliable fall-back service, while the avatar tracking is handled in a pure P2P fashion whenever possible. This way backbone overload is prevented in a self-organizing manner whenever client density tends to overburden the backbone infrastructure.