How to Keep a Dead Man from Shooting

The state-of-the-art approach to realize consistency in distributed virtual environments (e.g., action games, multi-user virtual reality, and battlefield simulations) is dead reckoning. A fundamental problem of dead reckoning is that participants may perceive different states for the same entity. While these inconsistencies will eventually be repaired, the resulting state of an entity may be incorrect. In this position paper we will investigate the reasons for this type of problem and propose an improved consistency approach. Our approach guarantees that all participants of a session will eventually agree on what has really happened and how the correct state of the medium should look like. In order to reach this aim we propose to transmit events as additional information, thereby allowing a simple timewarp algorithm to reconstruct the correct state of the distributed virtual environment.