FiVES: an aspect-oriented approach for shared virtual environments in the web

Abstract

Virtual Environments have become a compelling tool for various applications beyond gaming and Virtual Worlds, for example, for education, collaborative engineering, or simulation and visualization. In the emerging field of smart environments, like Smart Cities and Smart Factories for industry or agriculture, a digital counterpart of a real-world site, driven by hundreds of Internet of Things sensors that emit their data in real-time, is a central part of the application. Maintaining such a large-scale virtual environment and keeping it up-to-date with changing requirements set by connected sensors and services is a challenge. For this, we present FiVES, a server framework that is based on an aspect-oriented architecture to create highly maintainable large-scale virtual environments by avoiding cross-cutting concerns like tangling or scattering of code between modules in resulting applications. We present a fully functional implementation of our system that builds on an extendable and versatile data model, a flexible plugin mechanism, and a transparent yet efficient synchronization layer that is independent of the modules from which applications are assembled.