Technical Issues in the Design of a Scalable Shared Virtual World

The Virtual Society is a long-term research initiative that is investigating the evolution of the future electronic society. Our vision for this electronic society is a shared 3D virtual world where users, from homes and offices can explore, interact and work. Obviously, such an ambitious project cuts across many different domains. In this paper we concentrate on some of the computing infrastructure issues, and in particular on how we can build a system that will scale to support many thousands of interacting users in real-time