Registration rooms, lobbies, and portals: interconnecting large-scale networked virtual environments and collaborations

Abstract

To support larger numbers of simultaneous users, virtual environments (VEs) must be partitioned over multiple servers. This paper describes an architecture for interconnecting large-scale VEs and collaboration systems over the Internet. The user establishes and maintains a persistent network identity, transfers that identity between VEs and maintains that identity while moving between management domains of a single VE. Our implementation logically extends (and therefore easily integrates with) the existing World Wide Web.