MMVE 2010

 
The 3rd International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments
at
ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
17-19 November, 2010, Taipei, Taiwan

[ News | Introduction | Schedule | Topics | Submission | Important Dates | Organizers & TPC | ACM ACE | Call for Papers (TXT)(PDF) ]

News

Proceedings
All MMVE papers will be included in NetGames 2010 proceedings (indexed by IEEE Xplore & ACM DL), thanks to NetGames organizers.

Photos from the event
The event has passed and we had a good time. Some photos from the event are here.

MMVE Participants Survey
We are always trying to improve MMVE - both for physical and virtual (remote) participants. To do so, we ask our participants to fill in a short survey. You can find the survey here. Thank you!

MMVE Remote Participation
MMVE is experimenting this year with online remote participation using Web.Alive. To join us go to: http://ec2-184-72-191-233.compute-1.amazonaws.com/2190/html/indexAuth.html.

MMVE to merge with NetGames 2010
Due to the budget constrain of this year's ACE organizers, MMVE is now being merged as a session of the NetGames 2010 workshop, and the workshop date will change from Nov. 19 to Nov. 17, please see the detailed NetGames program.

As part of the arrangement, the good news is that MMVE participants will also be able to participate fully in NetGames' second day events, with access to keynote and all paper sessions. Inclusion of MMVE papers into NetGames proceedings is also now being negotiated. We will let you know if the proposal will materialize.

MMVE10 at Twitter
You can follow news on the MMVE 2010 workshop on twitter. Go to http://twitter.com/MMVE10 to join.

 

Introduction
Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) systems are spatial simulations that provide real-time human interactions among thousands to millions of concurrent users. MMVEs have experienced phenomenal growth in recent years in the form of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage, and social communities such as Second Life and Hobbo Hotel. The technical aspect of designing, developing, and deploying them is highly interdisciplinary and involves experts from many domains, e.g., graphics, networking, protocol and architecture designs. The MMVE workshop intends to provide a forum for both academic researchers and industry developers to investigate the architectural and system support for MMVEs. By gathering experts under one roof, we wish to discuss their findings, incite collaborations, and move the state of the art forward.
 

Workshop Schedule (Session at NetGames 2010: 4:00pm - 6:00pm) - Chair: Richard Süselbeck
4:00pm - 4:30pm Integration of P2P and Clouds to Support Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments [paper] [slides]
by Emanuele Carlini (IMT, Lucca, Italy, CNR-ISTI, Italy), Massimo Coppola (CNR-ISTI, Italy) and Laura Ricci (University of Pisa, Italy)

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) are attracting millions of players from all over the world. Currently used Client/Server infrastructures and technologies are reaching their limits of flexibility and scalability.

We propose an approach that combines the technological advantages of two different paradigms, namely P2P networking and Cloud Computing. Our proposal leverages known P2P techniques like Virtual Nodes and consistent hashing, as well as separate overlays for different purposes, e.g. interest and object management.

We propose combining these techniques with the definition of a specific role in the overlay for Cloud-based, trusted resources. This enables the distribution of the MMVE on top of a mix of Cloud and user resources. The solution outlined allows building key-value distributed storage systems that can resize at run-time (elasticity) and provide scalability and load balancing features to the MMVE platform.


4:30pm - 5:00pm Time Management for Virtual Worlds based on Constrained Communication Model [paper] [slides]
by Umar Farooq and John Glauert (University of East Anglia, U.K.)

Time Management (TM) is an integral part of the parallel and distributed systems that maintains the temporal order of events in a system. In this paper, we present a decentralised TM approach using a constrained communication model based on the inherent properties of virtual worlds. The proposed method uses a flat communication model and a region synchronises itself with a set of regions that share boundaries with it. It is evaluated with the help of a simple simulation model and compared with non-synchronised and decentralised scenarios. The simulation results show that it maintains local causality constraint and reduces communication of messages over the network. It is potentially more scalable and minimises longer delays and complexity compared with hierarchical strategies with multiple levels.


5:00pm - 5:30pm Distributed Scene Graph to Enable Thousands of Interacting Users in a Virtual Environment [paper] [slides]
by Dan Lake, Mic Bowman, Huaiyu Liu (Intel Labs, U.S.A.)

Virtual environments are currently limited to no more than a hundred interacting users by the simulator-centric server architectures used for many of these applications. There are some potential new usages such as virtual concerts and sporting events involving hundreds or thousands of users and we seek to enable these exciting new applications. We propose a distributed scene graph (DSG) architecture which enables massive scaling of scene complexity and participants with the addition of hardware. A prototype implementation of the DSG components to manage client communications demonstrates an order of magnitude increase in the number of concurrent users. We present the design of this component within the DSG architecture, prototype implementation based on an open source virtual environment server and our experimental setup, workloads and results.


5:30pm - 6:00pm Progressive Cache Replacement for Massive Peer-to-Peer WebVR Worlds [paper] [slides]
by Wei Wang, Jin-Yuan Jia, Yang Yu (Tongji University, China) Shun-Yun Hu (Academia Sinica, Taiwan, R.O.C.)

As the popularity of WebVR applications rises in recent years, a great disparity exists between the huge 3D content on servers and the limited cache capacity on clients. In order to alleviate server loading, peer-to-peer (P2P)-based 3D content distribution has been proposed recently. However, given the limited cache sizes at clients, how to maintain and replace the cache content effectively becomes an important issue. We present a progressive scene replacement mechanism (PSRM) in this paper to support interactive walkthrough in P2P-based large-scale WebVR worlds. First, we define a new metric called preservation degree, based on both the visual attention paid by the user and the contentís potential relevance for sharing. Second, cached objects are replaced progressively with ascending order in terms of their preservation degrees. Experimental results have shown that PSRM enables users with limited cache to walkthrough a large-scale WebVR world with high visual quality; while download requests handled by the servers are reduced significantly.

 

Topics
The workshop seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the field, and will encourage discussions based on the presented papers to identify current and future research topics. Some key and emerging issues we would especially like to solicit are:
  • The integration of MMVE with social networking systems such as Facebook and Instant Messengers.
  • The adoption of parallel techniques (e.g., GPU, P2P, household set-top boxes) to increase scale.
  • Interoperable MMVE standards and protocols based on observations or abstractions of existing systems.
More specifically, the workshop addresses the following MMVE topics:
  1. Scalability, the ability to handle at least thousands of concurrent users, interacting via Internet.
  2. Interactivity, how to provide responsive, near real time interactions despite latency and jitter.
  3. Consistency, providing consistent views for users, despite the inherent delay in state updates.
  4. Persistency, the ability to save and access the world states despite disconnections and failures.
  5. Security and privacy, distributed algorithms that allow secure interactions and privacy guarantees.
  6. Interoperability, integration of multiple systems or providers with common protocols or clients.
  7. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) devices, the integration of mobile devices for nomadic systems.
  8. Self-organizing architectures, load balancing and fault tolerance without manual configurations.
  9. Content streaming, voice communication and 3D content streaming.
  10. Implementation issues, novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of development.
 

Submission Guidelines
Paper submissions must cover one of the topics listed above, or a closely-related one. Submitted papers must be 5-6 pages long and must be blinded. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. All submissions will be peer-reviewed (double blind) and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions are handled online with the electronic submission system EasyChair. To register / submit a paper, click here:

Paper submission is closed.

All MMVE papers will be included in NetGames 2010 proceedings (indexed by IEEE Xplore & ACM DL), thanks to NetGames organizers. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].

 

Important Dates
Submission Deadline: August 30th, 2010 September 6th, 2010 September 13th, 2010 (extended)
Acceptance Notification: October 4th, 2010
Camera Ready Version: October 11th, 2010
Workshop Date: November 17th, 2010 (updated!)
 

Organizers

TPC Co-Chairs:

Steering Committee:
 

Technical Program Committee (prelim.)
  • Maha Abdallah, University of Paris VI, France
  • Dewan T. Ahmed, University of Ottawa, Canada
  • Christian Bouville, IRISA, France
  • Romain Cavagna, University of Paris VI, France
  • Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
  • Chris GauthierDickey, University of Denver, USA
  • Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research, Norway
  • Behnoosh Hariri, University of Ottawa, Canada
  • Aaron Harwood, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Sebastian Holzapfel, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
  • Jehn-Ruey Jiang, National Central University, Taiwan
  • Stephan Krause, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
  • Jay Lorch, Microsoft Research, USA
  • Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil
  • Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium
  • Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
  • Simon Rieche, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
  • Ingo Scholtes, University of Trier, Germany
  • Gwendal Simon, TELECOM Bretagne, France
  • Richard Sueselbeck, Univ. Mannheim, Germany
  • Matteo Varvello, Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, NJ, USA
  • Shinya Yamamoto, Tokyo University of Science, Yamaguchi, Japan
  • Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore, Singapore