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Avatar mobility in user-created networked virtual worlds: measurements, analysis, and implications

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Abstract

We collected mobility traces of avatars spanning multiple regions in Second Life, a popular user-created virtual world. We analyzed the traces to characterize the dynamics of the avatars’ mobility and behavior, both temporally and spatially. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of peer-to-peer architecture, interest management, mobility modeling of avatars, server load balancing and zone partitioning, caching, and prefetching for user-created virtual worlds.

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Notes

  1. http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

  2. www.libsecondlife.org

  3. All time mentioned in this paper are based on local (Singapore) time (UTC +8).

  4. The term zone here has no relationship to that in Section 7.2

  5. Unfortunately we cannot distinguish between clockwise and anti-clockwise rotation. Otherwise we can compute the average rotation angle, which will provide more insights.

  6. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_cache

  7. http://nemesys.comp.nus.edu.sg/projects/secondlife

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ian Tay and Ming Feng Neo from National University of Singapore and Vikram Srinivasan of Bell Labs Research India for useful discussions throughout this project. We thank Markus Esch from University of Luxembourg for contributing to the analysis of cluster nodes in Section 7.1. This work is partially supported by National University of Singapore Academic Research Fund R-252-000-306-112.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, 1 Fusionopolis Way, # 21-01 Connexis (South Tower), Singapore, Singapore, 138632

    Huiguang Liang

  2. Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore, Singapore, 119260

    Ransi Nilaksha De Silva & Wei Tsang Ooi

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore, Singapore, 119260

    Mehul Motani

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  1. Huiguang Liang
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Correspondence to Huiguang Liang.

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Liang, H., De Silva, R.N., Ooi, W.T. et al. Avatar mobility in user-created networked virtual worlds: measurements, analysis, and implications. Multimed Tools Appl 45, 163–190 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0304-x

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