Extended Description

The core objective of 3DIM is to facilitate the creation of fully interactive 3D environments accessible over the various popular public and enterprise Instant Messaging services such as (MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, YIM, Jabber, Microsoft LCS, Lotus Sametime, SIP Mobile Clients etc.) on various access devices (such as PDAs, Mobile Phones, Tablet PCs, Desktop PCs, Consoles etc.) and networks (such as 3G and IP networks), where users of the 3DIM service can interact with each other, autonomous agents and objects within the worlds, in an intuitive manner.

These are the major components of the system:

·        IM Protocol Gateway: A standard means of communicating with various public and enterprise IM services. From the diagram it can be seen that the 3DIM server can communicate with various devices on differing networks with IM software installed on them. The gateway may exist as a service on a separate server or as an API utilised by the 3DIM server. 3DIM will build on existing work at the TSSG.

·        3DIM Server: The 3DIM server hosts 3DIM services. These services are marked up 3D worlds and models with extra behavioural information specified for user interaction. State information such as session information etc. may be stored here also as well as avatar definitions. It therefore has a data repository associated with it.

·        3DIM client: This is simply 3D rendering and virtual world exploration software installed on the client to interoperate with a particular IM client installed. It deals with rendering the world presented by the 3DIM service and also sending and receiving positional and kinetic movement information of characters and objects in the 3D worlds.