An Open and Scalable Croquet-Based Collaboration Infrastructure for Support of 3-D Simulation-Based Research and Education

研究界越来越多地转向3D虚拟世界技术，作为支持协作、基于模拟的科学发现和教育的一种手段。 然而，商业上可用的技术已经采用了基于服务器的架构方法来创建和部署虚拟世界。 这些方法极大地限制了科学虚拟组织的能力，以满足其3-D建模，动态仿真和实时协作的需求，在一个可扩展的方式。该提案采用了一种独特的方法来应对与快速创建和广泛部署大规模互连的3-D虚拟世界和用于研究和教育的网络相关的挑战。 研究人员将利用Croquet软件开发架构的点对点通信协议来构建基于对等的开源3-D浏览器/虚拟世界创作工具包的参考实现。 该工具包将支持快速临时创建新的虚拟工作空间，并支持分布式研究团队之间的多地点会议，其成员将享受共享存在感、非语言沟通的基础、3D模型共享的能力，沿着协作文档共享和编辑以及网络电话。该参考实现还将为模块化接口开发提供一个健壮的平台，为可扩展分布式协作领域的进一步探索提供一个可用的基础，并为未来的研究奠定基础：（1）支持大量研究人员、教育工作者和学生的特定同步通信和协作需求的最佳方法;以及（2）实现新的互连的、具有深度能力的虚拟网络的大规模的、具有成本效益的扩散的方法，以支持研究、教育和科学推广。 研究人员将在开源中免费提供参考实现，以刺激共享网络环境的开发和传播，用于分布式虚拟组织和教育社区成员之间的协作决策，问题发现和解决的阶段，观察和评估。

Research communities are increasingly turning to 3-D virtual world technologies as a means of supporting collaborative, simulation-based scientific discovery and education. The commercially available technologies, however, have adopted server-based architectural approaches to virtual world creation and deployment. These approaches significantly limit the capacity of scientific virtual organizations to meet their 3-D modeling, dynamic simulation, and real-time collaboration needs in a scalable fashion. This proposal adopts a unique approach to the challenges associated with the rapid creation and broad deployment of large scale interconnected 3-D virtual worlds and workspaces for research and education. Investigators will leverage the peer-to-peer communications protocols of the Croquet software development architecture to build a reference implementation of a peer-based open source 3-D browser / virtual world authoring toolkit. This toolkit will enable the rapid ad hoc creation of new virtual workspaces and support multi-site meetings among distributed research teams whose members will enjoy a sense of shared presence, a basis for non-verbal communication, a capacity for 3-D model sharing, along with collaborative document sharing and editing and networked telephony. The reference implementation will also provide a robust platform for modular interface development and a usable basis for further exploration in the area of scalable distributed collaboration and establish a basis for future research on: (1) optimal methods of supporting the ad hoc synchronous communication and collaboration needs of large numbers of researchers, educators, and students; and (2) ways of achieving large-scale, cost efficient proliferation of new interconnected and deeply capable virtual workspaces in support of research, education, and science outreach. Investigators will make the reference implementation freely available within the open source to stimulate the development and dissemination of shared cyberenvironments for the staging, observation and evaluation of collaborative decision-making, problem finding, and problem solving among members of distributed virtual organizations and educational communities.