Using separation and composition of concerns to build multiuser virtual environments

Developing multiuser virtual environments (MUVE) is a very complex task since it involves several engineering domain aspects such as virtual reality, cooperative work and distributed systems. Furthermore, existing technologies like graphics capabilities, processing power and network bandwidth, are permanently evolving. For MUVE systems to be successfully developed, they must not only deal with all the different aspects that are inherent to these systems but also have the ability to deal with the continuous technology and requirements evolution. To cope with these problems, a software engineering separation of concerns approach is proposed. Concerns are identified for each of the different aspects of MUVEs. To obtain the necessary flexibility, each one of the concerns should abstract its possible variations in order to support the future system evolution. Moreover it is shown how concerns composition has the necessary expressive power to build multiuser virtual environments.