An Architecture for Co-Habited Virtual Worlds

As a recent trend, research in Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Interactive Simulation, and Virtual Reality shares a new centre of interest which we call cohabited virtual worlds (CHVW). Herein, synthetic agents and human-controlled avatars interact in a globally networked setting. Possible CHVW applications range from lifelike conferencing, virtual marketplaces, and entertainment up to intuitive visualisation of complex multi-agent systems. This paper presents the Effector-Medium-Sensor (EMS) architecture for building open CHVW. EMS introduces a form of virtually acting and sensing which bases on common standards, such as JAVATM, RMI, VRML’97, and CORBA. Our implementation, the Social Interaction Framework, demonstrates the ability of rapidprototyping multi-agent testbeds while not loosing sight of the general applicability.