Visibility-based interest management in collaborative virtual environments

One of the challenges facing developers of large-scale and content-rich Collaborative Virtual Environments is the lack of bandwidth to support the exchange of information between participants. It is usually not feasible for all participants to receive all the data produced by all other participants. It is therefore necessary to filter out some of such data for every user according to their interest. This paper presents an interest management mechanism based on each user's visibility of others. Its main features include occlusion awareness and visibility-based filtering, no need for a server and renderer-based visibility calculation.