Registration rooms, lobbies, and portals: interconnecting large-scale networked virtual environments and collaborations

To support larger numbers of simultaneous users, virtual environments (VEs) must be partitioned over multiple servers. This paper describes an architecture for interconnecting large-scale VEs and collaboration systems over the Internet. The user establishes and maintains a persistent network identity, transfers that identity between VEs and maintains that identity while moving between management domains of a single VE. Our implementation logically extends (and therefore easily integrates with) the existing World Wide Web.