Customer Reviews

Networked Virtual Environments: Design and Implementation (ACM Press Books)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an EXCELLENT book. Appropriate for beginners and experts in the Network VE area. Has good coverage both of technical and non-technical issues. Easy to read, informative, and presents many of the original contributions of the authors.

Provides a good grounding in issues that must be addressed by anyone embarking upon the development of massive multiplayer games. It also represents the laying of one of the first foundations of knowledge necessary for the building of cyberspace.

I love this book. It is technical, comprehensive, well-written, and deals with an area which is gaining popularity rapidly, both in academia and industry. Dr. Gurminder Singh, Director (Learning Lab), Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore

This book is the first one to cover all aspects of networked virtual environments in a very readable and in-depth manner! A must-read for everyone interested in distributed interactive applications on the Internet. Martin Mauve, Network Protocol Scientist, Siemens Telecooperation Center, Saarbrücken, Germany.

This is the only book that I know of that is dedicated to networked virtual environments. This is a systems level book, so if you are looking for code listings or tons of algorithms, you will be disappointed. The author assumes that you have already obtained a basic knowledge of computer graphics, network programming, and virtual reality. This book simply integrates these sciences into the discussion of the trade-offs and decisions that must be made at a high level if you wish to design a networked virtual environment. Chapters one and two are suitable for non-technical people to read since they are discussing the promise and the origin of networked VE's. Chapter 3, "A Networking Primer", is mainly discussing networking protocols in the context of which one is best to use in particular VE situations. If you know nothing about computer networking before you read this chapter, it will leave you totally confused. Chapter 4 entitled "Communication Architecture" discusses client-server versus peer-to-peer architectures for multi-user environments and which does best in different situations. As with Chapter 3, if you do not already have an understanding of computer networking, this chapter will probably leave you confused. Chapter 5, " Managing Dynamic Shared State", discusses the issue of maintaining shared state among various hosts in a networked VE. Bandwidth, computation, latency, data consistency, and reproducibility are all discussed. To understand this chapter it would help to have had a course in operating systems on the graduate level, although, as with previous chapters, the discussion is kept at a high level. Chapter 6, "Systems Design", discusses the fundamental software architecture issues in the development of networked virtual environments. The issues covered include thread allocation for multi-threaded environments, real-time rendering and collision detection, and computational resource management. In this chapter it would help if the reader was familiar with the concepts of threads as well as computer graphics. Although the discussion is kept at a systems level, this chapter is more technical than the others, and the point of the discussion is to achieve as much of a sense of realism for the VE user as possible. Chapter 7, "Resource Management for Scalability of Performance", is even more technical than chapter six and gets down to a lower level of discussion with pseudocode being shown. The purpose of the chapter has to do with "scaling" your design so that it works equally well for small and large numbers of users. Chapter 8, "Internet Networked Virtual Environments", shows its age more than the previous chapters in that it has a pretty extensive discussion of VRML which has now become pretty much obsolete. The chapter acts as an examination of internet-based virtual environments. Also note that many of the websites shown as part of the bibliography of the chapter are now dead links due to the age of the book and the obsolescence of VRML. Chapter 9, "Perspectives and Predictions", is the final chapter of the book, and looks at the past, present, and future of networked VE's. However the "present" for this book is 1999, so this chapter has limited usefulness. This book was a five star book when it was published in 1999, and it still has many good insights, but the amount of time that has passed since its publication is starting to make it beg for a second edition. For this reason only do I subtract a single star from its rating and give it four stars. For a more recent treatment of virtual environment system design you might want to read "Designing Virtual Reality Systems : The Structured Approach" by Kim, which was published in August 2005.

I have yet to find another text with as complete and thoroughly easy-to-understand treatment of distributed simulation as NetVE. Where is the next edition? Surely Singhal & Zyda have more wisdom to share.

+4 stars for such wonderful coverage of the topic. All the key attributes, major tradeoffs, and challenges are covered simply and completely.

+1 more for the *fantastic* book cover. Look at this thing, it's absolutely hilarious.

This first comprehensive reference on the subject of Networked VR. Very readable, with a mix of the history and the science on the topic. Michael Macedonia, Chief Scientist and Technical Director, US Army Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM)