Supporting web-based client in large-scale collaborative virtual environment

Abstract

Web-based large-scale collaborative virtual environment (LCVE) system allows a large number of concurrent users in an ever-evolving virtual environment to communicate and interact with each other over the internet. Internet users can join the LCVE using standard browser and VRML plug-in. To support dynamic construction of LCVE contents, a webbased client is required to communicate with LCVE server for dynamic downloading of 3D scene contents and synchronizing of scene states. The communication between webbased client and LCVE server often needs to have additional network ports for multithread data transmission. However, the web-based clients are often behind the firewall of a corporate network which usually blocks non 80 ports. This makes dynamic construction of LCVE content not possible for web-based clients. The research aims to develop an efficient tunneling method that is capable of supporting web-based client for real-time dynamic construction of a persistent large-scale collaborative virtual environment over the internet.