Key Technologies for Networked Virtual Environments

Abstract

Thanks to the improvements experienced in technology during the last few years, most especially in virtual reality systems, the number and potential of networked virtual environments or NVEs and their users have been increasing. NVEs aim to give distributed users a feeling of immersion in a virtual world and the possibility of interacting with other users or with virtual objects inside it, just like when they interact in the real world. Being able to provide that feeling and natural interactions when the users are geographically separated is one of the goals of these systems. Nevertheless, this goal is especially sensitive to different issues, such as different connections with heterogeneous throughput or particular network latencies, which can lead to consistency and synchronization problems and, thus, to a worsening of the users’ quality of experience or QoE. With the purpose of solving these issues, researchers have proposed and evaluated numerous technical solutions, in fields like network architectures, data distribution and filtering, resource balancing, computing models, predictive modeling and synchronization in NVEs. This paper gathers and classifies them, summarizing their advantages and disadvantages, using a new way of classification. With the current increase in the number of NVEs and the multiple solutions proposed so far, this paper aims to become a useful tool and a starting point not only for future researchers in this field but also for those who are new to NVEs development, in which guaranteeing a good users’ QoE is essential.