Synchronous collaboration in virtual environments: Architecture, design, and implementation.

In terms of the distribution of objects' update information is today's Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), the focus in most existing architectures is on the movement of avatars and vehicles, not on collaboration. In this thesis, a novel architecture for the support of closely-coupled collaborative tasks in CVEs is presented. This architecture consists of an application-layer model that represents higher-level collaborative actions of users, and a communication architecture called the Synchronous Collaboration Transport Protocol (SCTP) which is a sender-initiated interaction-based transport protocol for CVEs. In addition to theoretical analysis and simulation, proof of concept is provided by implementation of the INVENTIST1 prototype. The main goal of this research can be summarized as the design, justification, simulation, and implementation of an architecture that, in comparison to others, has higher efficiency for performing tightly-synchronous collaborative tasks in CVEs. 1INVENTIST: INception of Virtual ENvironments' TIghtly Synchronous Tasks