Spatial Culling of Interpersonal Communication within Large-Scale Multi-User Virtual Environments

Abstract

by Aaron Pulkka

Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee:
Professor Steven L. Tanimoto
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

The GreenSpace project intends to develop "an immersive communication medium" to allow people physically located in disparate locations all over the world to share experiences in common virtual spaces.

As the number of users sharing a common virtual environment increases, the amount of data made available by those users can become overwhelming to the network connecting them as well as the users themselves. Users want to receive relevant communication, while the system automatically filters out the rest.

The goal of this research was to determine an intuitive and efficient approach for facilitating scalable interpersonal communication within the GreenSpace system. This has been accomplished by examining existing multi- user systems and developing a prototype combination of the most promising approaches found.

The result of this research is that spatial culling can provide an intuitive and efficient basis for the control of interpersonal communication within large-scale multi-user virtual environments for a variety of applications.