Virtual Environments(VEs) are proving to be valuable resources in many
fields, and they are even more useful when they involve multiple users
in distributed environments. Many useful VEs were designed to be
stand-alone applications, without consideration for integrating them
into a distributed VE. Our approach to connecting VEs is to define an
abstract model for the interconnection, use integration tools to do as
much of the work automatically as possible, and use a run-time
environment to support the interconnection. With our experiences to
date, we are learning that certain classes of techniques are common to
all solutions using this approach. We have summarized these in a set
of requirements and are building a system that features these
techniques as first class objects. In the future you will be able to
solve these interconnection problems cheaply, plus engineers of future
VEs will have some guidance on how they should organize their
implementations so that interconnection with other VEs will be easier.
In this paper we coin the phrase "software engineering of virtual
environments" (SEVE) to describe the above activities.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-89
