Metaverses and Distributed Virtual Environments

A virtual environment is a computer simulation system that provides users with sensory information in such a way that they can readily visualize, explore, and interact with the entities in a virtual landscape. A distributed virtual environment (DVE)  is intended for multiple users to interact within a virtual world in real-time even though they are at geographically different locations. Manufacturing, social media, such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and Metaverses (such as Second Life or   Facebook Meta) are characteristic instances of DVEs.

The emergence of high bandwidth and low latency network and IoT infrastructures have fostered the development of large scale DVE applications which aim to support hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of participants. As DVEs become larger, more data-intensive and latency-sensitive, scalability becomes a crucial element for their successful deployment. Partitioning, load balancing, synchronisation and interest management are issues at the core of the scalability challenge.

In the context of complex and autonomous systems simulation, with my team we have investigated the challenges for distributed simulations based on logical time.  Another stream of our work has delivered novel techniques and algorithms for real-time DVEs such as those utilised in MMOGs and Metaverses.