Don Brutzman
Naval Postgraduate School
Although networking is considered to be "different" than computer graphics, network considerations are integral to large-scale interactive 3D graphics. Graphics and networks are now two interlocking halves of a greater whole: distributed virtual environments. New capabilities, new applications and new ideas abound in this rich intersection of critical technologies. Our ultimate goal is to use networked interactive graphics to take full advantage of all computation, content and people resources available on the Internet. Network breakthroughs repeatedly remove bottlenecks and provide new opportunities. A pattern appears as we attempt to scale up in capability and capacity without limit: every old bottleneck broken reveals another. Understanding the bottlenecks, the corresponding solutions and potential upper bounds to growth permits us to develop effective networked graphics. When we overcome current bottlenecks, "effectively networked graphics" will mean "applications." Internetworked graphics can be examined from the perspectives of connectivity, content, interaction, economics, applications and personal impacts. Internetworking refers to the ability to seamlessly interconnect multiple dissimilar networks globally. Connectivity has numerous dimensions including capacity, bandwidth, protocols and the many-to-many capabilities of multicasting. Content equals the World-Wide Web and includes any type of information, dataset or stream that might be used in the graphics environment. Interaction implies minimal latency, a sense of presence, and the ability to both access and modify content. The economics of networked graphics environments is developing rapidly and principal forces can be identified. Applications drive infrastructure development and are the most exciting part of networked graphics. Finally, the personal impacts which accompany these developments range from trivial to profound as high-quality interactive internetworked computer graphics become the norm on all computers. Achieving these goals will be examined from the perspective of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), a proposed Cyberspace Backbone (CBone) and a proposed Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol (VRTP).
Don Brutzman works in interactive 3D graphics, robotics, artificial intelligence and high-performance networking for large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs).