MOVE:: component groupware foundations for collaborative virtual environments

ABSTRACT

The design of a Virtual Environment (VE) is a distributed problem of multi-user access to shared resources. Such problem requires careful design decisions in order to provide a seamless system infrastructure capable of supporting flexible interactions in the shared scenarios.The complexity of this domain has led to intricate software systems that provide ad-hoc solutions to specific problems. Furthermore, many of them have gone to a dead end, due to their non-extensible design and their lack of code and module reuse.This paper presents a VE that is constructed on top of a component groupware framework. Our major aim is to provide an extensible infrastructure offering a set of collaborative services in a seamless way. At the conceptual level, it provides essential collaborative services: shared sessions, support for synchronous and asynchronous components, security, coordination, and a server-side awareness infrastructure. At the architectural level, the framework is constructed on top of a middleware integration platform and uses high performance publish/subscribe notification services. Finally, we present the advantages and limitations of this approach.

REFERENCES

• 1: Wolfgang Broll, Populating the Internet: supporting multiple users and shared applications with VRML, Proceedings of the second symposium on Virtual reality modeling language, p.33-ff., February 24-26, 1997, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/253437.253448]
• 2: Raimund Dachselt , Michael Hinz , Klaus Meißner, Contigra: an XML-based architecture for component-oriented 3D applications, Proceeding of the seventh international conference on 3D Web technology, p.155-163, February 24-28, 2002, Tempe, Arizona, USA [doi>10.1145/504502.504527]
• 3: DIVE Homepage. http://www.sics.se/dive.
• 4: Garcia P, Skarmeta A., Rallo R., ANTS: A new Collaborative Learning Framework, European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. 2001.
• 5: Chris Greenhalgh , Jim Purbrick , Dave Snowdon, Inside MASSIVE-3: flexible support for data consistency and world structuring, Proceedings of the third international conference on Collaborative virtual environments, p.119-127, September 2000, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/351006.351027]
• 6: H-Anim Humanoid Working Group. http://www.h-anim.org
• 7: Hofte, G. Henriter. Working Apart Together: Foundations for Component Groupware. Telematica Instituut, Enschede, The Netherlands, 1997, 288.
• 8: Ivan Marsic, DISCIPLE: a framework for multimodal collaboration in heterogeneous environments, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.31 n.2es, June 1999 [doi>10.1145/323216.323225]
• 9: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Scalable Platform for Large Interactive Networked Environments (SPLINE). http://www.merl.com/projects/spline/.
• 10: NPSNET Research Group. http://www.movesinstitute.org/~npsnet/index.html.
• 11: Manuel Oliveira , Jon Crowcroft , Mel Slater, Component framework infrastructure for virtual environments, Proceedings of the third international conference on Collaborative virtual environments, p.139-146, September 2000, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/351006.351030]
• 12: Wolfgang Prinz, NESSIE: an awareness environment for cooperative settings, Proceedings of the Sixth European conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.391-410, August 1999, Copenghagen, Denmark
• 13: Mark Roseman , Saul Greenberg, Building real-time groupware with GroupKit, a groupware toolkit, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.3 n.1, p.66-106, March 1996 [doi>10.1145/226159.226162]
• 14: Rudolph, M. Jamal:Components Frameworks and Extensibility. http://www.web3d.org/TaskGroups/x3d/lucidActual/jamal/JamalImpl.html
• 15: Tower Project. http://tower.gmd.de.
• 16: U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Distributed Interactive Simulation, IEEE Standard 1278. 1993.
• 17: VRML 97 External Authoring Interface. http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/vrml-eai/Specification/
• 18: K. Watsen , M. Zyda, Bamboo - A Portable System for Dynamically Extensible, Real-Time, Networked, Virtual Environments, Proceedings of the Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, p.252, March 14-18, 1998
• 19: ANTS MOVE. http://ants.etse.urv.es/move/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
component groupware, distributed systems, frameworks, virtual environments