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Engineering Animation Inc. has recently announced a client/server based networking solution named World2World, which integrates with its family of
award winning products WorldToolKit and WorldUp to enable developers to quickly and efficiently create
multi user 3D/VR simulation applications for Intranet and Internet deployment. This suite of tools will enable customers to take advantage of the decreasing cost of 3D graphics acceleration and increasing bandwidth and network pervasiveness to create compelling collaborative and distributed 3D
real-time interactive simulations.
Unlike the recent spate of networking packages targeted primarily at game and chat applications, World2World has been designed specifically for the business community (applications like collaborative design/engineering, distance learning, multi-participant training, etc.).
Corporate focused features include secure firewall traversal and efficient transfer of data across a range of common enterprise network architectures. World2World's client/server networking model allows
multi user 3D/VR applications to be efficiently deployed via the Internet as well as other local and wide area networks.
Powerful and Complete
World2World employs a client/server architecture to distribute and synchronize simulation data. The primary reason we decided on a client/server architecture is because commonly used broadcast or multicast capabilities are not readily available on the Internet. A server-based system also gives us a single point of synchronization for data consistency. Another advantage of a server-based system is the ability to use message filtering and optimized reliability techniques at the server to reduce bandwidth usage.
In the multicast or broadcast approach to networking, every machine communicates their data to the network and everyone listens to everything put on the network. This is optimally efficient on dedicated networks where all machines are interested in all updates. However, not all simulations run over dedicated networks. The Internet is the largest example of a non-dedicated network. More importantly, forcing every participant to receive every update for every other participant severely limits the number of potential participants, especially over low-bandwidth connections.
A simple server approach quickly runs into scalability problems as well. Since all messages are routed through a central process, the scalability of the system is limited by the power of the machine hosting that central process.
Sense8's distributed simulation architecture employs two tiers of servers to manage this scalability problem, providing additional processing power and bandwidth for the task of managing shared simulation data. This architecture separates administrative functionality on the server manager from high performance data distribution on the simulation server.
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