Enhancing collaboration in virtual reality applications

We derive a complete component framework for transforming standalone virtual reality (VR) applications into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative virtual reality environments (CVREs), after characterizing existing implementations into a feature-rich superset. Our main contribution is placing over the existing VR tool a very concise and extensible class framework as an add-on component that provides emerging collaboration features. The enhancements include: a scalable arbitrated peer-to-peer topology for scene sharing; multi-threaded components for graphics rendering, user interaction and network communications; a streaming message protocol for client communications; a collaborative user interface model for session handling; and interchangeable user roles with multicamera perspectives, avatar awareness and shared 3D annotations. We validate the framework by converting the existing ALICE VR Navigator into complete CVRE, with experimental results showing good performance in the collaborative inspection and manipulation of complex models.