Virtual Human Representation and Communication in Networked Virtual Environments

The realism in participant representation involves two elements: believable appearance and realistic movements. This becomes even more important in multiuser networked virtual environments (NVE), as participants' representation is used for communication. A NVE can be defined as a single environment which is shared by multiple participants connected from a different host. The local program of the participants typically store the whole or a subset of the scene description, and they use their own avatars to move around the scene and render from their own viewpoint. This avatar representation in NVEs has crucial functions in addition to those of single-user virtual environments: