Exploring the use of Strongly Consistent Distributed Shared Memory in 3D NVEs

Abstract

Virtual and Augmented Reality is one of the key driving technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is expected to radically disrupt almost every business sector and transform the way we live and interact with our environment and each other. End-user devices will soon enable users to immerse in 3D Virtual Environments (VEs) that offer access to remote services, such as health care, training and education, entertainment and social interaction. The advent of fast highly-available network connectivity in combination with afford- able 3D hardware (GPUs, VR/AR HMDs, etc.) has enabled making Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) possible and available to multiple simultaneous end-users beyond the confines of expensive purpose-built 3D facilities and laboratories. However, the algorithms making possible the NVEs of today are already reaching their limits, proving unreliable, suffer asynchronies and deployed over an inherently fault-prone network infrastructure. Current developments of distributed architectures used in NVEs handle concurrency by either providing weak consistency guarantees (e.g., eventual consistency), or by relying on the bounded life span of inconsistent states. Although sufficient for non-critical, yet time sensitive applications, those solutions will be incapable of handling the next generation of interactive Virtual Environments, where precise consistency guarantees will be required. Thus, new scalable, robust, and responsive strategies that can support the needs of the NVEs of tomorrow are necessary. Recent scientific works are shifting the viewpoint around the practicality of strongly consistent distributed storage spaces by proposing latency-efficient algorithms of atomic R/W Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) with provable consistency guarantees. In this work we focus on transforming the theoretical findings of DSMs into tangible implementations and in investigating the practicality of those algorithmic solutions in Virtual Environments.