Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In this chapter, a user who joins the virtual environment through his desk-
top computer is called the desktop player. Meanwhile, the mobile player is
the user who uses a wearable computer or a notebook to wirelessly login
to the virtual environment and to interact with others while he is moving
in the physical world. In the following sections, the feasibility of allowing
the wearable computer user to join the network virtual environment is dis-
cussed based on the background technologies of the MiMAR system. The
conceptual architecture of the MiMAR system along with research issues are
then followed in the next section. Finally, the implementation of a prototyp-
ing MiMAR system is given in the last section.
6.3 Background Technologies
Virtual reality (VR) is the technology that allows a user to interact with a
simulated synthetic world generated by computer graphics. Cooperative vir-
tual reality (CVE) is the extension of VR technology by using the network
to connect multiple VR systems into an unified virtual environment. This
network and computer-generated synthetic environment is aimed to enable
geographically distributed users to be immersed in the same virtual space
and to interact with each other in real time. The study of CVE is a popular
research topic since 1983. However, only a few application areas gained suc-
cessful breakthrough achievement, such as Massively Multiplayer Online
Game (MMOG) [14] and military simulation [15]. One of the key reasons is
that players of current NVE systems are required to sit in front of a computer
to participate in the activities and such limitation significantly reduces appli-
cations of NVE. Along with the development of computing technologies
presently, people are currently demanding to interact on computers anytime
and anywhere. This demand brings up the evolution of PvC [16] or ubiqui-
tous computing [17].
The original goal of PvC is to embed network computing nodes throughout
the physical environment to provide sensible computing service to the user.
In other words, PvC attempts to augment the man-machine computation to
provide seamless computing anywhere and anytime. The PvC encompasses
a wide range of research topics including distributed computing, mobile
computing, sensor networks, human-computer interaction, and artificial
intelligence. Furthermore, the research of mobile computing combined with
VR technology is called mobile augmented reality (MAR) [18].
Mobile augmented reality is the integration of augmented reality and
mobile computing systems into one. The significance of MAR is to augment
the capability of mobile computing by adding friendly interface from aug-
mented reality technology. Or, we may say that MAR frees the legacy aug-
mented reality from the desktop with the help of mobile computing. Mobile
