Building virtual environment systems (and games) with user network awareness

The current development approach with networked applications is to isolate the user from the state of the network. With virtual environment systems and online games, this design principle seriously hampers the utility of the application for the users, who associate most disruptions to network problems. The perceptual network metaphors (PNM) is a novel approach to handle the negative impact of degraded network performance on people´s experience with online applications of real-time interaction. Contrary to hiding the impact of the network from the participants, the application monitors the state of the network and integrates the information in the display in a seamless fashion. The paper presents the PNM conceptual framework and an early prototype