An architecture for web-based collaborative 3D virtual spaces using DOM synchronization

Abstract

The advent of affordable virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) has sparked significant research activity for creating new principles and algorithms to enable the display of VR content on these devices. However, the development of current VR content is mostly limited to experts using proprietary tools and protocols. A major goal of VR is to allow multiple people to meet and collaborate in the same virtual space, but the implementation time and complexity of creating multi-user 3D environments and games is presently a large barrier to entry for developers. This paper presents a web-based architecture that combines a 3D graphics framework using HTML-like markup with a Document Object Model (DOM) synchronization technique to enable the simple creation of social, user generated, and persistent virtual worlds. By ensuring that relevant 3D scene data remains in the DOM and that synchronization takes place using a novel DOM synchronization mechanism, a social VR experience is created that allows multiple users to collaboratively modify the 3D environment in real-time.