Managing missed interactions in distributed virtual environments

A scalable distributed virtual environment (DVE) may be achieved by ensuring virtual world objects communicate their actions to only those objects that fall within their influence, reducing the need to send and process unnecessary messages. A missed interaction may be defined as a failure to exchange messages to appropriately model object interaction. A number of parameters under the control of a DVE developer may influence the possibility of missed interactions occurring (e.g., object velocities, area of influence). However, due to the complexities associated with object movement and the deployment environment (e.g., non-deterministic object movement, network latency), identifying the value for such parameters to minimise missed interactions while maintaining scalability (minimal message passing) is not clear. We present in this paper a tool which simulates a DVE and provides developers with an indication of the appropriate values for parameters when balancing missed interactions against scalability.