Combining Java with VRML worlds for Web-based collaborative virtual environment

As an extension of WWW, Web-based collaborative virtual environment is a next generation interface, for collaborators geographically dispersed to work together. Virtual reality modeling language, a kind of description language for 3D worlds, is appropriate for constructing, distributing, and rendering a shared 3D world of CVE system over WWW. However, the current VRML technology does not support multi-user directly and all VRML contents per se are collaboration-unaware. To supply the gap between VRML world and CVE system, Java technology is integrated with VRML through an interface called external authoring interface (EAI) provided by VRML language. This paper analyses the requirements and design considerations of generic CVE system; then it presents generic system architecture for CVE systems. Based on these design considerations and requirements, this paper proposes a new Java-based framework for web-based CVE which adopts VRML language to construct, distribute and render a shared 3D world over the Internet, and integrates Java with VRML through EAI to manage and control the virtual world to support multi-user collaboration.