SharedWeb-a shared virtual environment over World Wide Web

Describes the design implementation and experimental results for a multi-user 3D World Wide Web (WWW) browsing system called SharedWeb, which is based on the request-response method of a WWW server. The key features of this system include: (i) the WWW server's ability to remember all the browsers connected to it in order to transmit those messages required to maintain consistent states among the browsers, (ii) the dead-reckoning technique of distributed interactive simulation (DIS) used by the browsers in order to reduce the number of messages sent out on the network and to satisfy the timing requirement demanded by virtual environments, and (iii) the protocol data unit (PDU), also used in DIS, adapted by the SharedWeb system in order not only to include more information about the browsers but also to integrate SharedWeb with DIS in the near future.