Developing social virtual worlds using NetEffect

Abstract

This paper describes NetEffect, an infrastructure for developing, supporting, and managing large, media-rich, 3-D social virtual worlds for use by several thousand geographically-dispersed users using low-end computers (PCs) and modems. It has been modularized into six components, in the form of a toolkit, which simplifies the development of network-based virtual worlds. NetEffect partitions a whole virtual world into communities, allocates these communities among a set of servers, and migrates clients from one server to another as clients move through the communities. It devotes special attention to minimizing the network traffic, particularly the traffic that must go through servers. HistoryCity, a virtual world for children, has been developed on NetEffect, which is currently being beta-tested for deployment in Singapore.