Urbi Et Orbi

Note: This project is no longer being worked upon.

The Urbi et Orbi project aims to build a distributed environment framework whose first applications are virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are virtual 3D scenes personneld with common objects (houses, trees, etc.),avatars (i.e. the virtual image of the users) in which one may walk around and interact. In addition, this virtual world is distributed,in the sense that its full description is spread over several computers, connected via a network. There is no needfor a single host to have a full knowledge of the world. We focus on virtual worlds for a large audience, therefore there are no other material requirements than a standard personal machine, with a connection to a local network or the Internet. Windows and unix or linux platforms are supported. Scalability is required.

Compared to related projects the main characteristics of Urbi Et Orbi are:

• Full distribution.
  The architecture is fully distributed: to support large scale application, no host can be privileged. This is achieved thanks to a small distribution kernel, the mmk.
• Partially asynchronous.
  Our aim is to build large scale DVEs,therefore we chose to drop usual requirements. Most of the data exchange is performed asynchronously and we use a wide range of protocols to adapt the costs to the needs.
• Data management.
  While developing our own virtual world we felt the need to supply the objects with rich semantics (type, behavior, etc.) in addition to the usual geometric descriptions. Therefore we developed a language, goal, to describe the objects and their behavior.
• Unusual programming tools.
  Whereas many projects rely on Java and VRML from end to end, we felt that different tasks were better addressed with different languages. In particular, the infrastructure of the project (typically the network and distribution layers) and descriptions of virtual worlds have a very distinct nature.
• Functional ground.
  Finally, the whole architecture, from the distribution engine to the goal interpreter, is implemented in a functional programming language, ocaml.

Additionally, we paid special attention to remain programmer friendly, firstly for us, since the project is quite complex, but also for future developers of virtual worlds with the urbi et orbi framework.

Screen shots

Publications

The following is a list of publications related to Urbi Et Orbi. You can browse other LRDE's publictions here.

Alexis Angelidis and Geoffroy Fouquier. Visualization Issues in Virtual Environments: from Computer Graphics Techniques to Intentional Visualization. In the proceedings of the 9th International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG'2001), (V. Skala, Ed.; ISBN 80-7082-713-0) vol. 3, pages 90-98, Plzen, Czech Republic, February 2001

Yoann Fabre, Guillaume Pitel, and Didier Verna. Urbi et Orbi: Unusual Design and Implementation Choices for Distributed Virtual Environments. In the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM'2000), Intelligent Environments Workshop (published by IOS Press, USA; ISBN 1-58603-108-2), pages 714-724, Gifu, Japan, October 2000

Yoann Fabre, Guillaume Pitel, Laurent Soubrevilla, Emmanuel Marchand, Thierry Géraud, and Akim Demaille. A Framework to Dynamically Manage Distributed Virtual Environments. In the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Worlds (VW'2000), J.-C. Heudin (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series, LNAI 1834, Springer-Verlag, pages 54-64, Paris, France, July 2000

Yoann Fabre, Guillaume Pitel, Laurent Soubrevilla, Emmanuel Marchand, Thierry Géraud, and Akim Demaille. An asynchronous Architecture to Manage Communication, Display, and User Interaction in Distributed Virtual Environments. In the proceedings of the 6th Eurographics Workshop on Virtual Environments (EGVE'2000), J.D. Mulder and R. van Liere (Eds.), Computer Science / Eurographics Series, Springer-Verlag Wien New York, pages 105-113, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 2000
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