Issues in the Design of a Flexible Distributed Architecture for Supporting Persistence and Interoperability in Collaborative Virtual Environments

CAVERN, the CAVE Research Network, is an alliance of industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVE-based virtual reality hardware and high performance computing resources, interconnected by high-speed networks, to support collaboration in design, education, engineering, and scientific visualization. CAVERNsoft is the collaborative software backbone for CAVERN. CAVERNsoft uses distributed data stores and multiple networking interfaces to provide persistence, customizable latency, data consistency, and scalability that are typically needed to support collaborative virtual reality.