A Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) sets out to create an environment for thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of users to simultaneously interact with each other as in the real world. For example, Massively Multiuser Online Games (MMOGs), now a very profitable sector of the industry and subject to academic and industry research, is a special case of MMVEs where hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously play games with each other. Although originally designed for gaming, MMOGs are now widely used for socializing, business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes. One could say that MMOGs are the “killer app” that brings MMVE into the realm of eSociety. This is evident from the fact that Virtual currencies such as Linden (or L$) in Second Life are already being exchanged for real-world money. Similarly, virtual goods and virtual real-estate are being bought and sold with real-world money. Massive numbers of users spend their time with their fellow players at online games like EverQuest, Half-Life, World of Warcraft, and Second Life. World of Warcraft, for example, has over twelve million users with a peak of over 500,000 players online at a given. There is no doubt that MMOGs and MMVEs have the potential to be the cornerstone of any eSociety platform in the near future because they bring the massiveness, awareness, and inter-personal interaction of the real society into the digital realm.
In this talk, we focus on approaches for supporting the massive number of users in such environments, consisting of scalability methods, zoning techniques, and areas of interest management. The focus will be on networking and system support and architectures, as well as research challenges still remaining to be solved.
