Don Brutzman

MBone provides audio and video across the Internet

Researchers have produced the Multicast Backbone (MBone), which provides audio and video connectivity from outer space to under water/spl minus/and virtually everyplace in between. MBone is a virtual network that has been in existence since early 1992. It originated from an effort to multicast audio and video from meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Today. hundreds of researchers use MBone to develop protocols and applications for group communication. Multicast provides one-to-many and many-to-many network delivery services for applications such as videoconferencing and audio where several hosts need to communicate simultaneously. This article describes the network concepts underlying MBone, the importance of bandwidth considerations, various application tools, MBone events, interesting MBone uses, and provides guidance on how to connect your Internet site to the MBone.<<ETX>>

The virtual reality modeling language and Java

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and Java provide a standardized, portable and platform- independent way to render dynamic, interactive 3D scenes across the Internet. Integrating two powerful and portable software languages provides interactive 3D graphics plus complete programming capabilities plus network access. Intended for programmers and scene authors, this paper provides a VRML overview, synopsizes the open development history of the specification, provides a condensed summary of VRML 3D graphics nodes and scene graph topology, describes how Java interacts with VRML through detailed examples, and examines a variety of VRML/Java future developments. Overview. The Web is being extended to three spatial dimensions thanks to VRML, a dynamic 3D scene description language that can include embedded behaviors and camera animation. A rich set of graphics primitives provides a common-denominator file format which can be used to describe a wide variety of 3D scenes and objects. The VRML specification is now an International Standards Organization (ISO) specification (VRML 97). Why VRML and Java together? Over twenty million VRML browsers have shipped with Web browsers, making interactive 3D graphics suddenly available for any desktop. Java adds complete programming capabilities plus network access, making VRML fully functional and portable. This is a powerful new combination, especially as ongoing research shows that VRML plus Java provide extensive support for building large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs). This paper provides historical background, a detailed overview of VRML 3D graphics, example VRML-Java test programs, and a look ahead at future work.

NPSNET: a multi-player 3D virtual environment over the Internet

in the Proceedings of the 1995 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 9 - 12 April 1995, Monterey, California.

NPSNET-V. A new beginning for dynamically extensible virtual environments

At the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) we, like others in the collaborative VE community, have extolled the virtues of persistent online virtual worlds for years. We previously addressed the infrastructure requirements of a large-scale, persistent online virtual world: runtime extensibility of both content and applications; scalability in world complexity and number of participants; and composability of heterogeneous content and applications. We follow those arguments with the first publication describing NPSNET-V.

Using Web services to integrate heterogeneous simulations in a grid environment

The distributed information technologies collectively known as Web services recently have demonstrated powerful capabilities for scalable interoperation of heterogeneous software across a wide variety of networked platforms. This approach supports a rapid integration cycle and shows promise for ultimately supporting automatic composability of services using discovery via registries. This paper presents a rationale for extending Web services to distributed simulation environments, together with a description and examples of the integration methodology used to develop significant prototype implementations, and argues for combining the power of Grid computing with Web services to further expand this demanding computation and database access environment.

Virtual reality transfer protocol (VRTP) design rationale

The capabilities of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) permit building large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs) using the Internet and the World Wide Web. However, the underlying network support provided by the hypertext transfer protocol (http) is insufficient for LSVEs. Additional capabilities for lightweight peer-to-peer communications and network monitoring need to be combined with the client-server capabilities of http. To accomplish this task, we present a detailed design rationale for the virtual reality transfer protocol (VRTP). VRTP is designed to support VRML in the same manner as http was designed to support HTML. Since VRTP must be highly optimized on individual desktops and across the Internet, a Cyberspace Backbone (CBone) is also needed for VRTP development and testing. VRTP appears to be a necessary next step in the deployment of all-encompassing interactive internetworked 3D worlds.

Integrated simulation for rapid development of autonomous underwater vehicles

The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) integrated simulator has been designed to support complete scientific visualization of AUV vehicle performance. High-resolution 3D graphics workstations can provide real-time representations of vehicle dynamics, control system behavior, mission execution, sonar processing and object classification. Use of well-defined, user-readable mission log files as the data transfer mechanism allows consistent and repeatable simulation of all AUV operations. Examples of integrated simulation are provided using the Naval Postgraduate School AUV, an eight-foot, 387-pound untethered robot submarine designed for research in adaptive control, mission planning, mission execution, and post-mission data analysis.<<ETX>>

Internetwork infrastructure requirements for virtual environments

in White Papers - The Unpredictable Certainty, National Academy Press, pp. 110-122, 1997. Also in the Proceedings of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Symposium, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), San Diego, CA, December 13-15, 1995.

Virtual Chesapeake Bay: interacting with a coupled physical/biological model

The Chesapeake Bay Virtual Environment (CBVE) is a multidisciplinary, collaborative project that fuses 3D visualizations of numerically generated output, observations and other data products into a large-scale, interactive virtual world that supports investigation of coupled physical/biological and environmental processes. Although still under development, CBVE provides an application framework for integrating circulation and biological models with the computer visualization paradigm of the virtual world. In this article, we first briefly describe the physical environment and the observed effects of winds, tides and river runoff on the Chesapeake Bay system. Then we describe the CBVE components and conclude with our efforts directed at understanding how environmental variability may affect the recruitment and retention of the larval phase of certain local marine species.

X3D: Extensible 3D Graphics Standard

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2007.905889