On Designing and Testing Distributed Virtual Environments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes key challenges in designing and testing Distributed Virtual Environment systems, emphasizing issues like correctness, scalability, and user experience through experiments with OpenSimulator.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of design and testing challenges in DVE systems, highlighting six critical dimensions and offering insights for future research.

Findings

Identified six key design concerns for DVE systems.

Experimental insights from OpenSimulator highlight challenges.

Discussion on intrinsic difficulties and future directions.

Abstract

Distributed Real-Time (DRT) systems are among the most complex software systems to design, test, maintain and evolve. The existence of components distributed over a network often conflicts with real-time requirements, leading to design strategies that depend on domain- and even application-specific knowledge. Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) systems are DRT systems that connect multiple users instantly with each other and with a shared virtual space over a network. DVE systems deviate from traditional DRT systems in the importance of the quality of the end user experience. We present an analysis of important, but challenging, issues in the design, testing and evaluation of DVE systems through the lens of experiments with a concrete DVE, OpenSimulator. We frame our observations within six dimensions of well-known design concerns: correctness, fault tolerance/prevention, scalability, time sensitivity, consistency, and overhead of distribution. Furthermore, we place our experimental work in a broader historical context, showing that these challenges are intrinsic to DVEs and suggesting lines of future research.