CDI Type I: Virtual Worlds: Scalability and Content Creation

虚拟世界是联网的三维环境，它模拟三维空间中的物理交互，并将这种交互与地理约束分离。虚拟世界为教育、商业和科学发现开辟了新的途径，并可以显著增强虚拟组织中的协作。要实现这一点，需要可扩展且安全的系统架构，并辅之以用于创建虚拟世界内容的适当工具。该项目旨在设计、构建、部署和评估一个虚拟世界平台，作为虚拟世界技术和应用的研发平台。两个主要的研究方向是系统架构和内容创作。在系统架构方面，该项目将开发：(1)连续动态世界分区，以最大限度地利用资源和容错；(2)基于能力的安全引擎，无缝执行访问控制；(3)可扩展的内容分发网络，用于带宽密集型虚拟世界内容；以及(4)保护隐私的虚拟世界事件存档，用于科学研究和探索。在内容创建方面，该项目将研究特定于领域的建模工具，这些工具利用领域知识和社区输入来极大地简化三维建模过程。该项目显著推动了虚拟世界系统和三维内容创建的最先进水平。这个可扩展且安全的虚拟世界平台将能够支持数百万参与者在共享的三维模拟环境中并发交互。新颖的内容创建方法将使未经培训的参与者能够为各种应用领域创建独特的高质量三维对象。专门的数据收集能力将以前所未有的规模支持社会科学、法律和经济研究，并对大规模行为数据进行分析，这些数据可能会对人类和社会行为产生深刻而新颖的见解。

Virtual worlds are networked three-dimensional environments that simulate physical interaction in three-dimensional spaces and decouple such interaction from geographic constraints. Virtual worlds open new avenues for education, business, and scientific discovery, and can significantly enhance collaboration in virtual organizations. To accomplish this requires scalable and secure system architectures, complemented by appropriate tools for creating virtual world content. This project aims to design, build, deploy, and evaluate a virtual world platform for use as a research and development platform for virtual world technology and applications. The two major research thrusts are system architecture and content creation. For system architecture, the project will develop: (1) continuous dynamic world partitioning for maximal resource utilization and fault tolerance, (2) a capability-based security engine that seamlessly enforces access controls, (3) a scalable content distribution network for bandwidth-intensive virtual world content, and (4) privacy-preserving archiving of virtual world events for scientific research and exploration. For content creation, the project will investigate domain-specific modeling tools that leverage domain knowledge and community input to drastically ease the three-dimensional modeling process.The project significantly advances the state of the art in virtual world systems and three-dimensional content creation. The scalable and secure virtual world platform will be able to support millions of participants concurrently interacting in a shared three-dimensional simulated environment. The novel content creation methodologies will enable untrained participants to create unique high-quality three-dimensional objects for a variety of application domains. Dedicated data collection capabilities will support social science, legal, and economic research on previously unseen scales, with analysis of large-scale behavioral data that may yield deep and novel insights into human and societal behavior.