The vision of a "3D Web" as a combination of massive online virtual environments and today's WWW currently attracts a lot of attention. While it provides a multitude of opportunities, the realization of this vision on a global scale poses severe technical challenges. This work-in-progress paper intends to point out some of the major challenges and highlights key concepts of an infrastructure that is being developed in order to meet them. Among these concepts, special emphasis is put on the usage of a two-tier Peer-to-Peer approach, the implementation of Torrent-based data distribution and the development of a graded consistency notion. The paper also briefly presents the current state of a prototype implementation that is being developed in order to validate these concepts and evaluate alternative approaches.
Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) and especially the idea of a "3D Web" as a combination of a MMVE and today's WWW currently attracts a lot of attention. The realization of such a vision on a global scale though poses severe technical challenges to the underlying network infrastructure. It is generally accepted that such a global scale scenario can only be realized in a distributed fashion. The HyperVerse project aims at the provision of a federated global scalable infrastructure for such a "3D Web" scenario. We propose a two-tier Peer-to-Peer infrastructure that combines a loosely structured overlay network of user clients with a highly-structured overlay network of reliable so-called Public Servers constituting the backbone of our architecture. This paper presents the Grid-based Plane Partitioning Protocol (GP3), a structured Peer-toPeer overlay network for the interconnection of the Public Servers that realizes a spatial index in order to allow fast location based queries.
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