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FiVES: an aspect-oriented approach for shared virtual environments in the web

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Abstract

Virtual Environments have become a compelling tool for various applications beyond gaming and Virtual Worlds, for example, for education, collaborative engineering, or simulation and visualization. In the emerging field of smart environments, like Smart Cities and Smart Factories for industry or agriculture, a digital counterpart of a real-world site, driven by hundreds of Internet of Things sensors that emit their data in real-time, is a central part of the application. Maintaining such a large-scale virtual environment and keeping it up-to-date with changing requirements set by connected sensors and services is a challenge. For this, we present FiVES, a server framework that is based on an aspect-oriented architecture to create highly maintainable large-scale virtual environments by avoiding cross-cutting concerns like tangling or scattering of code between modules in resulting applications. We present a fully functional implementation of our system that builds on an extendable and versatile data model, a flexible plugin mechanism, and a transparent yet efficient synchronization layer that is independent of the modules from which applications are assembled.

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Notes

  1. http://secondlife.com/.

  2. http://www.opensimulator.org/.

  3. http://www.realxtend.org.

  4. http://www.ogre3d.org/.

  5. http://clb.demon.fi/knet/.

  6. http://www.unity3d.com.

  7. https://www.unrealengine.com/.

  8. https://github.com/tospie/SINFONI.

  9. https://thrift.apache.org/.

  10. http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/latest/.

  11. https://threejs.org/.

  12. https://aframe.io/.

  13. http://www.jboss.org.

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Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper received funding from the European Union’s project FI-NEXT under Grant Agreement No 732851 and FP7/ICT-FI project FI-CORE under Grant Agreement No 632893, and from the project INVERSIV, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant Agreement No 01IW14004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Torsten Spieldenner, Michael Guldner & Philipp Slusallek

  2. Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Torsten Spieldenner

  3. University of Applied Sciences, 66117, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Michael Guldner

  4. Saarland University, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Sergiy Byelozyorov & Philipp Slusallek

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  1. Torsten Spieldenner
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  2. Sergiy Byelozyorov
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  3. Michael Guldner
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  4. Philipp Slusallek
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Correspondence to Torsten Spieldenner.

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Spieldenner, T., Byelozyorov, S., Guldner, M. et al. FiVES: an aspect-oriented approach for shared virtual environments in the web. Vis Comput 34, 1269–1282 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-018-1564-0

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