The Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a promising technology which provides an online shared virtual world for geographically dispersed people to interact with each other. However, the scalability of existing CVE systems is limited due to the constraints in processing power and network speed of each participating host. In this paper, a mobile agent based framework for large-scale CVE, MACVE, is proposed to support a large number of concurrent participants in a CVE with a large amount of evolving virtual entities. In MACVE, the CVE system is decomposed into a group of collaborative mobile agents, each of which is responsible for an independent system task. These agents can migrate or clone dynamically at any suitable participating host including traditional servers and qualified user hosts to avoid the potential bottleneck, which can improve the scalability of CVE. Our prototype system has demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed framework.

Virtual reality (VR) systems serve as a tool for users to become immersed in a virtual world, navigate through it, and interact with the synthetic objects in real time. Successful applications of VR can be found in many fields outside entertainment ranging from science and engineering to education. In this paper, we present our research work on using a synthetic subsea scenario to assist the navigation of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in and around an offshore installation. Our approach takes the ROVs position and orientation data from a sonar-based underwater positioning unit and generates a 3-D synthetic subsea navigation scenario that is based on a geometrical model of the offshore installation. It incorporates the “ROV safety domain” concept to ensure that the synthetic subsea scenario conveys sufficient accuracy for ROV navigation. Our research results have positively demonstrated the feasibility of assisting ROV navigation using a synthetic subsea scenario in combination with the ROV safety domain.