Mona Lisa Overdrive or Driving Miss Daisy: Building Responsive Distributed Virtual Environments.

Speaker: Graham Morgan

Abstract

In recent years the commercialisation of distributed virtual environments by the digital games industry has provided easy access to virtual worlds for anyone with an Internet connection. Thousands of individuals are now participating in “far away galaxies”, “lands of myth and legend” and “cities of heroes and villains”. Even though this appears exciting, such virtual worlds only appeal to a minority of the game playing public. This is not due to the graphics and sound quality of such games (they are on a par with most games), nor is it due to the story lines provided by the game developers (they provide more in-depth, involving, stories). So what is it? In this talk we describe the problems hindering the development of the online games market and indicate how work at Newcastle is trying to solve such problems.