An end-to-end communication architecture for collaborative virtual environments

Synchronous collaboration in virtual reality spaces has specific requirements that differ from those of other application data, leading to a different communication approach. Update messages corresponding to the change in the state of a shared object must be communicated both reliably and in a timely manner among users. While a lot of research has been done in terms of transmission of update messages representing the motion of avatars and objects, very few works focus on collaboration itself. Here, we present an architecture that supports tightly coupled collaborative tasks to be performed efficiently in virtual environments. The architecture consists of an application-general layer which is mapped into a communication protocol. An implementation is also presented as proof of concept.