Populating the Internet

Abstract VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— has estab-lished as the standard description language for 3D worlds on theInternet. Although it recently has been extended by features inorder to support behaviors and user interactions, enablingauthors to realize interactive virtual worlds, there is still a lack ofsupport to share such worlds with other users.In this paper we will present our approach on supportinglarge-scaled shared virtual worlds based on VRML by an appro-priate network infrastructure as well as mechanisms to partitionthese worlds. We will show how virtual worlds can be populatedby world-wide distributed users and applications, and the re-quirements to share behaviors and interactions between those.CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.2 ComputerCommunication Networks: Network Protocols; C.2.4 Com-puter Communication Networks: Distributed Systems -Dis-tributed applications; H.5.1 Information Interfaces and Pre-sentation Multimedia Information Systems - ArtificialRealities; I.3.2 Computer Graphics: Graphics Systems -Dis-tributed/network graphics;I.3.6 Computer Graphics: Meth-odology and Techniques - Interaction Techniques; I.3.7. Com-puter Graphics: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism -Virtual Reality;Additional Keywords Virtual reality modeling language(VRML), multiuser environments, subdivision of shared virtualworlds, multicasting.