A design and evaluation of the multi-user virtual environment server system for the Digital Museum

Abstract

The Digital Museum is an application of a multi-user virtual environment system. In the Digital Museum, objects are displayed as multimedia data, which is stored in the Digital Museum Server System (DMSS), and users can visit the Digital Museum by connecting user interface programs to the DMSS via a network. Many users can explore the Digital Museum simultaneously, and then they can interact with other users or objects in the Digital Museum. In this study, a prototype for the DMSS is developed. To manage many users in a large-scale virtual environment, this system is constructed as a multi-server system connected to a fast network. The number of update messages received by each client and server are dependent on the user density in the virtual environment but are independent of the number of servers, so the size of the virtual environment can be enlarged as the number of servers increases without increasing the number of update messages processed by the clients and servers.