A demand-driven approach for a distributed virtual environment

The relevance of distributed virtual environments (DVE) and interactive 3D worlds for entertaining and commercial purposes is steadily increasing. DVEs are typically implemented as traditional client/server based scenarios in which a central server system controls the state of the distributed data and sends update messages to all clients. In this paper we describe the benefits of a demand-driven approach for a DVE. A distributed operating system is used to host the DVE application. The common scene graph of the DVE resides in shared memory and offers direct access to the participating nodes - no explicit update messages are needed The shared memory concept allows for an easier, more intuitive and less fault-prone way of creating distributed applications like a DVE and it offers inherent consistency and efficiency because the nodes do not have to process unneeded update messages. An existing prototype demonstrates the benefits resulting from this concept.