Uninterruptible Play in Virtual Node-based Virtual Worlds

Abstract

For scalability, reliability and cost reduction, virtual environment has been evolved from the client-server model, peer-to-peer model, to the virtual node-based hybrid model. When objects are hosted by unreliable nodes, replication is applied for reliability. An important problem is to maintain replica consistency in interaction, while to minimize interaction latency in play. We propose a fast state machine replication model to address this issue. Besides correctness, our simulation shows the achievable high responsiveness. The work can also be applied in augmented and mixed reality systems, where hundreds of users interact with virtual elements on a common platform.