Diamond Park is a social virtual reality system in which multiple geographically separated users can speak to each other and participate in joint activities. The central theme of the park is cycling. Human visitors to the park are represented by 3D animated avatars and can explore a square mile of 3D terrain. In addition to human visitors, the park hosts a number of computer simulations, including tour buses and autonomous animated figures. Diamond Park is implemented using a software platform called Spline, which makes it easy to build virtual worlds where multiple people interact with each other and with computer simulations in a 3D visual and audio environment. Spline performs all the processing necessary to maintain a distributed, modifiable, and extendable model of a virtual world that is shared between the participants. For more information visit http://www.merl.com.
There is a natural desire to make multi-user virtual environments large in spatial extent, in numbers of objects, and in numbers of users interacting with the environment. However, doing this brings up several problems: eficiently managing the flow of large amounts of data between large numbers of users, representing precise position and velocity information about objects that are arrayed across a large volume of space, and allowing designers t o create parts of a virtual environment separately and combine them together later.Locales are an eficient method for solving these problems b y breaking up a virtual world into compact chunks that can be described and communicated independently. I n addition, locales can be used to support a number of special effects that allow virtzal worlds to easily transcend reality.While having many benefits, locales introduce an. additional problem: finding something when you do not know whai locale it is in. This is solved b y the companion concept of beacons, which makes it possible t o find something no matter where it is.
Building multiuser interactive multimedia environments at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) is a highly interdisciplinary activity, which involves the efforts of more than a dozen members of the laboratory. This report describes this research at three levels. At the bottom, supporting everything, are high-speed networks. On top of networks, we have built a piece ofmiddlewarecalled Spline. Finally, Diamond Park is an experimental environment we are building using Spline.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.