VGuide: A Synchronous Collaborative Virtual Reality Application

Graduate

This project involves the design and evaluation of VGuide, a synchronous virtual reality tool. VGuide enables one user to lead a group of users synchronously through a virtual world written in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). VGuide works with off-the-shelf VRML browsers and arbitrary worlds downloaded from the Internet. VGuide employs the services of Pavilion, a collaborative framework with extensive support for developing web-based distributed applications. This project demonstrates how virtual reality applications can use such collaborative frameworks to implement critical functions such as decentralized group communication, synchronization of web browsers, leader election, automatic distribution and preprocessing of web content, and support for application-specific semantics. Experimental studies on a mobile computing testbed demonstrate low jitter between the session leader and other participants.

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