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Survey of state melding in virtual worlds

Published: 07 September 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The fundamental goal of virtual worlds is to provide users with the illusion that they are all seeing and interacting with each other in a consistent world. State melding is the core of creating this illusion of a shared reality. It includes two major parts: consistency maintenance and state update dissemination. Well-designed state melding technologies are also critical for developing a virtual world that can scale to a large number of concurrent users and provide satisfying user experiences. In this article, we present a taxonomy of consistency models and categorization of state update dissemination technologies for virtual worlds. To connect theories and practices, we then apply the taxonomy to case study several state-of-the-art virtual worlds. We also discuss challenges and promising solutions of state melding in large-scale virtual worlds. This survey aims to provide a thorough understanding of existing approaches and their strength and limitations and to assist in developing solutions to improve scalability and performance of virtual worlds.

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cover image ACM Computing Surveys
ACM Computing Surveys  Volume 44, Issue 4
August 2012
318 pages
ISSN:0360-0300
EISSN:1557-7341
DOI:10.1145/2333112
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 September 2012
Accepted: 01 March 2011
Revised: 01 December 2010
Received: 01 April 2009
Published in CSUR Volume 44, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. State melding
  2. consistency maintenance
  3. consistency models
  4. scalability
  5. state update dissemination
  6. virtual worlds

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  • (2024)AI and 6G Into the Metaverse: Fundamentals, Challenges and Future Research TrendsIEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society10.1109/OJCOMS.2024.33494655(730-778)Online publication date: 2024
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