Challenges in Designing Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments: Experiences From MMVE 2008

The recent boom of virtual online societies like Linden Lab's Second Life (see Linden Lab Inc. (2008)) and Google Lifely (see Google (2008)) shows that there are increasing numbers of potential users for virtual and augmented reality systems. The development of such Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) poses new challenges on both distribution platforms and virtual reality systems. Addressing these challenges is a community-wide effort, necessitating the pooling of resources and experiences from both virtual reality and networking/distributed computing communities.