Software Architecture for the Construction and Management of Real-Time VirtualWorlds

摘要

As military budgets shrink, the Department of Defense (DoD) is turning to virtualworlds (VW) to solve problems and address issues that were previously solved by prototype or field exercises. However, there is a critical void of experience in the community on how to build VW systems. The Naval Postgraduate School's Network Vehicle Simulator (NPSNEI) was designed and built to address this need. NPSNET is a populated, networked, interactive, flexible, three dimensional (3D) virtual world system. This dissertation covers the construction and management of the VW in NPSNET. The system, which uses both standard and non-standard network message formats, is fully networked allowing multiple users to interact simultaneously in the VW. Commercial off the shelf (COTS), Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) workstations, hardware was used exclusively in NPSNET to ensure the usefulness and the portability of the system to many DoD commands. The core software architecture presented here is suitable for any VW. Computer graphics, Simulator, Simulation, Networks, Virtual worlds, Artificial reality, Synthetic environments, NPSNET.