An Architecture For Domain-Independent Collaborative Virtual Environments

The increase of computing power and its wide availability has raised interest in the use of Collaborative Virtual Environments for training purposes. Nevertheless, many of the currently developed training simulations are inflexible and support only a limited number of scenarios, often limited to a single domain. This work aims to investigate the challenges of separating the domain logic from the system using it. The work presented in this paper proposes to achieve the above by separating the architecture into three parts: domain knowledge, simulation environment and events space which links the previous two. The domain knowledge holds the scenario logic or behaviour which dictates how the scenario should run. The simulation environment is where participants meet and interact. The events space links the two parts by using the domain knowledge to control the scenario running in the simulation environment. By formulating our system in this manner we attempt to achieve the flexibility pursued and identify and tackle the challenges involved.