Distributed scene graph to enable thousands of interacting users in a virtual environment

Virtual environments are currently limited to no more than a hundred interacting users by the simulator-centric server architectures used for many of these applications. There are some potential new usages such as virtual concerts and sporting events involving hundreds or thousands of users and we seek to enable these exciting new applications. We propose a distributed scene graph (DSG) architecture which enables massive scaling of scene complexity and participants with the addition of hardware. A prototype implementation of the DSG components to manage client communications demonstrates an order of magnitude increase in the number of concurrent users. We present the design of this component within the DSG architecture, prototype implementation based on an open source virtual environment server and our experimental setup, workloads and results.