Eugene Ware's 1997 honours project was to produce an interactive, three-dimensional virtual world, distributed across many computers, where many clients could move around and interact with the world and with each other. In spirit, it followed on from Jamie Cameron's SIM, a distributed world created in 1995, but using technology that had become available since 1995 and also exploring the problems of "the great outdoors" in a 3D world.
Jamie Cameron's SIM world was an "indoors" world. Sections of the world (corridors, dungeons etc.) were distributed across several servers. Sections joined at corners, stair-wells and other places where line-of-sight between sections was not necessary. Back in 1995 Java and VRML were not mature so Jamie had to invent his own 3D modelling language and programming tools. Jamie wrote browsers for (i) text, (ii) X-windows and (iii) SGI's Inventor. The world ran for several months with servers on several Unix machines in the Monash Computer Science Department.
Eugene's 1997 project was to "get outside", not necessarily in a graphically-rich world, but definitely examining line-of-sight problems when dozens, potentially hundreds, of clients might be moving around in a very widely distributed virtual world. He made use of Sun Microsystem's Javatm platform and the Liquid Realitytm native-code VRML implementation. Inter-client communication was performed using multi-cast. The system was successfully demonstrated running across several Intel machines in January 1998(?).
Honours thesis and s/w:
See also:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/hons/projects_1997/Eugene.Ware/
L.Allison, 3/1999