If you've ever been present at an event in the virtual world of Second Life with more than forty or so people present, you'll be keenly aware of the issue of scaling. Once the population on a particular server tops fifty, things start to get a little shaky, and eventually there's a crash, or the whole thing becomes utterly unusable due to lag. Project Outback, a virtual world startup that's been under heavy wraps for some months, together with NICTA, an Australian research institute, are reportedly working on peer to peer technolgy that would solve those issues of scale.
In an an interview with Mark Wallace of the 3pointD blog, Dr. Santosh Kulkarni of NICTA says that the organization is working on an underlying structure to virtual worlds that uses modular peer to peer technology to address communications and information flow.
First, they tackled the challenge of indexing users in space, designing a spatial index that allows the various clients to discover users in the 3D space around them, without having to have all that presence information contained on a single server. Secondly, they tackled the problem of interacting, using multithreading techniques (among other things that got lost in a poor connection) to optimize communication between clients. Third came a security solution that obfuscates users’ IP addresses while still allowing clients to transmit the necessary information across the network.
Certainly peer to peer tech poses interesting possibilities for virtual worlds and it will be facinating to see how (if..) it's deployed on Project Outback when we're finally able to get a look.
