Study of the Avatar Migration Problem on the Networked Virtual Environment

[[abstract]]Networked virtual environment (NVE) is a study of the interaction among graphically distributive simultaneous participants of the same virtual world. Different researches have been proposed in the recent years to achieve such a goal. Scalability and resource management are two important research issues to increase the number of simultaneous participants. Furthermore, the multiple-server system to reduce system overhead for NVE is a common approach for the scalability issue, and Area-Of-Interest (AOI) to reduce network bandwidth consumption is the technique for the resource management issue. This paper presents an issue that is often raised for the NVE which is constructed by the multiple-server approach with the spatial AOI technique. The spatial AOI technique requires the virtual world to be partitioned into regions which are respectively managed by different servers. When an avatar locomotes inside the virtual world, it may pass the boundary and move into another region which is managed by another server. When this situation occurs, the client site may perceive inconsistent visual effect due to different contents in these two servers. We refer this situation as the avatar migration problem. This paper proposed a mechanism to solve this issue. This mechanism is based upon the mathematical model of spatial AOI presented in this paper. The message filter function for interest management is then given with the mathematical proof for its correctness and generalization. Significantly, the proposed interest management is the first mathematical model for the spatial AOI researches. Finally, an illustrative implementation with the interleaved squaring AOI technique is discussed.[[sponsorship]]成功大學-華新麗華數位生活科技研究中心; 成功大學資訊工程系[[conferencetype]]國內[[conferencedate]]20020626~20020627[[booktype]]紙本[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]臺南, 臺