Determining collisions between moving spheres for distributed virtual environments

We present an approach to collision detection that is appropriate for satisfying the requirements of interest management schemes used in distributed virtual environments. Such environments are characterized by their distributed deployment over a number of nodes connected via a computer network. The aim of an interest management scheme is to identify when objects that populate a simulation supported by a distributed virtual environment (objects could be hosted on different nodes) should be interacting via message exchange while preventing objects that should not be interacting from exchanging messages. The approach to collision detection presented in this paper produces accurate results when determining object interactions. Furthermore, we present variations on our approach that exploit any coherence that may exist in a simulation to provide a solution that may scale for large numbers of objects.