As many of you know, VR News has a regular monthly column called "shared worlds". During the course of the next year, we're going to be using that column to examine many of the key technical challenges involved in the creation of multi-user virtual environments.
As part of that process, we're going to be hosting an ongoing discussion on the sci.virtual-worlds newsgroup. Each month, the discussion will focus on a different aspect of multi-user technology, and the comments posted on the newsgroup will be incorporated into the VR News column in order to provide a range of opinions and insights.
In order to distinguish the VR News discussion thread from other threads on the newsgroup, a unique subject-line prefix of "[VRNEWS]" will be used. If you're interested in joining in on the discussion, just watch for that subject line in the newsgroup and feel free to post your thoughts on the subject being discussed.
February: Travel (inter-world travel, spatial/coordinate relationships, portals, scaling problems/activity clustering/bandwidth rationing)
March: Synchronicity (simultaneous distributed world updates, database consistency issues)
April: Policing (virtual money, identity, crime, spam avoidance)
May: World-building (tools, techniques, freedom to build)
June: [Annual Review of Multi-User VR Systems... no discussion topic]
July: Virtual Humans (avatars, autonomous v-humans, digital societies)
Aug: [Siggraph coverage... no discussion topic]
[No September issue]
October: Compatibility (problems arising from platform/performance differences, immersive vs non-immersive systems, different user interfaces, networking protocols and so forth)
November: Futures (beyond current horizons - re-writing the physics text book)
December: [V-Humans update]
If you can't get the USENET newsgroup, sci.virtual-worlds, you can subscribe to the mailing list VIRTU-L. VIRTU-L is the mailing list mirror of sci.virtual-worlds. Greg Newby <gbnewby@ils.unc.edu> is the maintainer of the list. He can be contacted if you experience problems with the automated system.
To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail message to the automated list server < listserv@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu>, with the following text in the body of the message:
subscribe VIRTU-L Your Full Name
(of course you need to you need to replace "Your Full Name" with your actual name, do not use quotes and do not use your userid).
Many thanks to the sci.virtual-worlds moderator, Toni Emerson, for her help in making this innovative project possible.
Bernie Roehl
University of Waterloo Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mail: broehl@ece.uwaterloo.ca Voice: (519) 888-4567 x 2607 [work]
URL: http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl