From Trend Analysis to New Virtual World System Design Requirements and Requirement Satisfaction Study.

Virtual worlds have become global platforms connecting millions of people and containing various technologies. The development of technology, shift of market value, and change of user preference shape the features of virtual worlds. In this paper, we first study the new features of virtual worlds and emergent requirements of system development through trend analysis. Based on the trend analysis, we constructed the new design requirement space. We then discuss the requirement satisfaction of existing virtual world system architectures and highlight their limitations through a literature survey. The comparison of existing system architectures sheds some light on future virtual world system development to match the changing trends of the user market. At the end of this study, we briefly introduce our ongoing study, a new architecture, called Virtual Net, and discuss its possibility in requirement satisfaction and new research challenges.