Distance-Aware Avatar Interaction in Online Virtual Environments

Immersive Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments currently attract a lot of attention. Going beyond the hype, one discovers interesting concepts and opportunities for a supposed future Web which is commonly called the 3D Web. The global provision of such a vision is much more than another evolutionary step in content visualization, rather severe technical challenges need to be addressed by the future Internet infrastructure and protocols. Existing commercial approaches feature only limited scalability due to mostly relying on centralized solutions. With global-scale scenarios like a 3D Web in mind, the application of distributed and decentralized techniques becomes indispensable. In the HyperVerse project we have developed a two-tier Peer-To-Peer architecture, incorporating a federation of reliable server machines and user clients as basic infrastructure for an open and scalable 3D Web. Based on this federated infrastructure a hybrid avatar management scheme has been proposed that reduces the server load considerably. Using this scheme, servers get unburdened especially in highly populated regions of an online environment. Moreover, the flash crowd problem is tackled in a self-scaling fashion. This paper presents a series of improvements of this avatar management scheme, focusing not only on reducing server load, but also latency, client and overall network load. These improvements are achieved through utilizing free server capacities and considering the real-world distance between communicating nodes to minimize network traffic.