Dynamic Terrain Data Exchange in a Collaborative Terrain Editor

Abstract

In a computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), data consistency between collaborating users is a crucial issue. Based on the type of the application, ensuring data consistency can be a lengthy process that takes time and affects the system’s performance. In most 3D application, terrain data are massive due to its size. Exchanging this data may be expensive and may cause significant delay. In a real-time collaborative terrain editor, this issue becomes more significant due to terrain data exchange is consistently occurred between collaborating users. We present a solution to perform a conflict-free dynamic terrain data exchange in a real-time collaborative terrain editor. Our objective is to develop a method that able to ensure data consistency amongst collaborating peers in real-time manner. The main idea of our method is to split the terrain into smaller patches and synchronize the changes efficiently by only exchanging the modified patches. We applied our solution to a collaborative terrain editor application to test its performance in a real-time collaborative editing session. The tests were done in multiple scenarios, using different patch model, brush size (in the terrain editor), and connection setup between server and collaborating clients. The result shows that our protocol is capable to maintain data consistency between collaborating clients in a real-time terrain edition session. The delay is varied and highly depends on the data size and client-server environment setup. The overall test shows that it is possible to perform a collaborative terrain editing with an acceptable response time delay. In this paper, we present our proposed method, the implementation, and the result data from the test.