High-level development of collaborative virtual environments

Modern collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) require sophisticated data exchange mechanisms to provide consistent and at the same time responsive interaction of a large number of users. While many of these mechanisms have been well studied, usually they represent isolated solutions requiring knowledge of low-level networking programming for implementation. In this regard, there is still a lack of universal, easily deployable and extensible framework that enables rapid creation of complete systems from scratch. In this paper we present a middleware framework allowing an application developer to easily implement and deploy custom CVEs for specific tasks without direct low-level network programming. The framework provides a high-level application programming interface to create, manage and distribute objects in a shared virtual environment. The software architecture, basic features and functionality, overall performance and possible practical applications of the proposed framework are discussed.