DOOViE: an architecture for networked virtual environment systems

Abstract

The paper introduces DOOViE (Distributed Object-Oriented Virtual Environment), which is the framework to ease the construction of multi user virtual environment over the network. The DOOViE concepts are aimed at the cyberspace applications that provide multiple services over the network. DOOViE concepts are based on the object oriented paradigm. As the high level component in the hierarchy of DOOViE concepts, we define a service block unit server/client model to provide a specific service, and a database to be shared among the service blocks. The target system is composed of a set of service blocks and databases. Since a service block is highly independent of others, a set of service blocks can be constructed on distributed machines over the network as well as on a single machine. This approach allows the reusability of these high level components, and makes the extension of the whole system easier. We implemented Webber, a prototype of the DOOViE concepts both as a proof of the concepts and as a way of investigating the tradeoff between the computational resource and the communication resource that is inherent in the distributed system.