Mosaic from NCSA and its decendants, based on the initial studies performed at CERN, have popularized the use of the new information space which is called 'World-Wide Web'. And then, some trials to extend this information space to a three dimensional, or an interactive space have been performed. However, although some such trials use the term 'Virtual Reality', they currently are primitive. For example, the standard for describing 3D worlds, called VRML, describes only the static appearance of virtual environments and cannot describe the change of the world over time. As stated, there has been no significant scheme for WWW-compliant, three dimensional, interactive virtual environments shared by multiple participants. Furthermore, the trials in the WWW domain have not adapted sufficiently the results from the networked virtual reality domain until now.
In order to provide the WWW with the 3D interactive multi-participant virtual world, there should take place some essential researches on mechanisms for efficient networking, sharing of the world among multiple participants, providing the participants with persistent virtual worlds by means of the stateless network infrastructure of the WWW, and helping the participants to communicate with each other easily.
This paper presents a proper architecture based on the prescribed essential researches, and implements a preliminary testbed for this scenario to verify the validity of the architecture.
