InVerse: Designing an interactive universe architecture for scalability and extensibility

Faster networks, faster processors, and standardized protocols have enabled the emergence of interactive applications running over commercial networks such as the Internet. In such applications, multiple users interact with one another by exchanging real-time information such as user position and orientation in a virtual world, live and recorded audio, video, and text. These applications include interactive shopping, team training, virtual meeting rooms, and multi-player games. However, to date, these interactive systems have supported a limited number of information types, offered limited scalability, and have failed to account for a heterogeneous network and processor environment. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of InVerse, an infrastructure that supports real-time interactive applications on the Internet. InVerse provides a common backplane for disseminating and managing multiple real-time data streams. Within this general-purpose structure, the InVerse system maximizes scalability by implementing a hybrid communications architecture that adapts itself to available network bandwidth, observed network latency, installed network security measures, and available services such as multicast.