User Intent as a Bandwidth Conservation Heuristic in Shared Virtual Environments

A shared virtual environment (SVE) architecture must en- sure that users have an up-to-date view of the world by communicating state between them. However, due to band- width constraints, it is impossible to propagate every even t to every user in a timely manner. At any given time a user intends to interact with some subset of the SVE entities; in this paper we discuss how knowledge of this intent can provide information about the events in which he is inter- ested, making it possible to improve bandwidth usage by prioritising delivery of those events. From this premise we develop EMLIN, a language that allows entities within an SVE to be described in terms of the interactions they sup- port. EMLIN compiles to C++ code that chooses a state dissemination protocol based on users' intent. As a user's intent changes with time, the relative priority with which events are sent to him changes accordingly.