A Study on Design Requirement Development and Satisfaction for Future Virtual World Systems

Bingqing Shen, Weiming Tan, Jingzhi Guo, Hongming Cai, Bin Wang and Shuaihe Zhuo
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Bingqing Shen: School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Weiming Tan: Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China
Jingzhi Guo: Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China
Hongming Cai: School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Bin Wang: Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China

Future Internet, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-28

Abstract: Virtual worlds have become global platforms connecting millions of people and containing various technologies. For example, No Man’s Sky (nomanssky.com), a cross-platform virtual world, can dynamically and automatically generate content with the progress of user adventure. AltspaceVR (altvr.com) is a social virtual reality platform supporting motion capture through Microsoft’s Kinect, eye tracking, and mixed reality extension. The changes in industrial investment, market revenue, user population, and consumption drive the evolution of virtual-world-related technologies (e.g., computing infrastructure and interaction devices), which turns into new design requirements and thus results in the requirement satisfaction problem in virtual world system architecture design. In this paper, we first study the new or evolving features of virtual worlds and emerging requirements of system development through market/industry trend analysis, including infrastructure mobility, content diversity, function interconnectivity, immersive environment, and intelligent agents. Based on the trend analysis, we propose a new design requirement space. We, then, discuss the requirement satisfaction of existing system architectures and highlight their limitations through a literature review. The feature-based requirement satisfaction comparison of existing system architectures sheds some light on the future virtual world system development to match the changing trends of the user market. At the end of this study, a new architecture from an ongoing research, called Virtual Net, is discussed, which can provide higher resource sufficiency, computing reliability, content persistency, and service credibility.

Keywords: virtual reality; augmented reality; virtual world; trend analysis; design requirement; distributed architecture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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