Chris Greenhalgh - MASSIVE
MASSIVE
Model, Architecture and System for Spatial Interaction in Virtual Environments.
This is a VR tele-conferencing system which I built as part of my PhD.
User-level features
- It is a multi-user distributed V.R. system.
- It runs on Sun and SGI platforms.
- There are textual, graphical and audio client programs (usable in any combination)
allowing users to communicate by graphical gestures, typed messages or real-time
packetised audio.
- Text users may interact with graphical users and vice-versa.
- All media are controlled by aura, focus and nimbus.
- It includes adaptor objects (e.g. conference table, podium).
- There may be any number of worlds with portals to move between worlds.
- Each process obtains and uses only (spatially) local information.
- New media can be added without affecting the core system.
Lower-level features
- connection oriented networking described by connected interfaces.
- interfaces integrating RPCs, streams and attributes.
- general-purpose type and value manipulation (including type-driven marshalling
and file parsing and a local-memory database).
- keyword-based interface trading for coordinating client programs for different
media.
- spatial interface trading based on aura collisions.
- medium-independent peer connections implementing focus, nimbus and awareness.
- integrated support for focus, nimbus and aura adaptors.
Experience
MASSIVE has been used in the COMIC project for international trials across Europe (e.g. 23/5/95: 9 users,
4 sites, 3 countries - UK, Sweden, Germany).
MASSIVE was used in the UK DEVRL project as one of the distributed VR systems
under test.
MASSIVE has been used extensively (17 meetings) in the BT/JISC funded Inhabiting the Web project.
MASSIVE usually works with up to about 10 users. It will work across the
internet without too much trouble (but don't expect anything interactive
- like MASSIVE - to run across the normal trans-atlantic links when they're
busy.
MASSIVE (version 1) is always and only a teleconferencing system and an
example implementation of the spatial model of interaction - its not a general-purpose
VR application development environment.
Availability
MASSIVE-1 is old. I guess you could get hold of it if you REALLY wanted
to.
The future
I have stopped development on MASSIVE1 and am working with Dave Snowdon on CVE (also known as MASSIVE-2).
Some References
- Greenhalgh, C., and Benford, S., "MASSIVE: a Distributed Virtual Reality
System Incorporating Spatial Trading," in Proc. IEEE 15th International
Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (DCS'95), Vancouver, Canada,
May 30 - June 2, 1995, IEEE Computer Society.
- Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlén, L., and Greenhalgh, C., "Managing mutual
awareness in collaborative virtual environments," in the Proc. of the ACM
conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST'94), Singapore,
August 1994, ACM Press.
- Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlén, L., Greenhalgh, C., Mariani, J., and Rodden,
T., "Networked Virtual Reality and Cooperative Work", to appear in Presence
(MIT Press), mid. 1995.
- Greenhalgh, C. M., and Benford, S. D. (1995): "MASSIVE: A Virtual Reality
System for Tele-conferencing", ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interfaces
(TOCHI), 2 (3), pp. 239-261, ISSN 1073-0516, ACM Press, September 1995.
- Greenhalgh, C., and Benford, S., "Virtual Reality Tele-conferencing: Implementation
and Experience," to be presented at ECSCW'95.
- Steve Benford and Lennart Fahlen, "A Spatial Model of Interaction in Virtual
Environments", in Proc. Third European Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work (ECSCW'93), Milano, Italy, September 1993.
- Greenhalgh, C., "An experimental implementation of the spatial model," in
Proc. 6th ERCIM workshops, Stockholm, June 1-3, 1994, Swedish Institute
of Computer Science, Stockholm, Sweden.
- Greenhalgh, C. (1997): "Analysing movement and world transitions in virtual
reality tele-conferencing", Internal report.
Links
Some pictures of MASSIVE.
Back to Chris's home page.
CVE = MASSIVE-2