Network Support for Scalable Distributed Multiparty Virtual Reality

This paper is about the design and implemenation of a protocol to support scalable distributed multiparty virtual reality systems. The paper covers the service requirements for the protocol, the range of protocol semantics, and the congestion avoidance scheme proposed for use with such systems. The goal is to show how multicast can be used in a variety of ways to construct a novel system that can admit very large numbers of simulataneous participants in an heterogeneous network. 1 Introduction Distributed VR is a relatively new area of research. Virtual reality systems are now largely software components, rather than requiring the dedicated head-up-display input controllers and renderer hardware of the past. Current high-end workstations can now render scenes described in VRML and other languages in near real time. The introduction of audio and video input and output on desktop machines led to the deployment of software based multimedia conferencing, we expect to see the deployment of..