A Service-Oriented Framework for Hybrid Immersive Web Applications

Immersive Web (IW for short) applications such as Second Life and SimCity are increasingly popular among individual users and companies. However, it is difficult to build a hybrid Immersive Web application, because of the different architectures used for building such IW applications. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented framework to support the mashup of heterogeneous IW applications for hybrid IW applications. We first model each object in IW (e.g., a virtual album or a virtual room) as an IW Object Service (IWOS) located by a unique URL with standardized service interfaces. As such, one IW application can use an IWOS instance in another IW application. Moreover, non-IW applications (e.g., an online album system) can also access an IWOS instance via its service interface. We further propose a service-oriented framework to manipulate these IWOS instances, to support the transition of these objects mainly between different IW applications, and to enable the transition between IW applications and non-IW applications. Our framework also includes the fundamental services to build hybrid IW applications. Finally, we provide examples to demonstrate the advantages of our framework, and conduct a qualitative analysis to show the effectiveness.