Adaptive scene synchronization for virtual and mixed reality environments

Technological advances in virtual environments facilitate the creation of distributed collaborative environments, in which the distribution of threedimensional content at remote locations allows efficient and effective communication of ideas. One of the challenges in distributed shared environments is maintaining a consistent view of the shared information, in the presence of inevitable network delays and variable bandwidth. A consistent view in a shared 3D scene may significantly increase the sense of presence among participants and improve their interactivity. This paper introduces an adaptive scene synchronization algorithm and a framework for integration of the algorithm in a distributed real-time virtual environment. In spite of significant network delays, results show that objects can be synchronous in their viewpoint at multiple remotely located sites. Furthermore residual asynchronicity is quantified as a function of network delays and scalability.