About

VOS Tech Design | Draft and Old Documentation

The Virtual Object System provides a way to structure data and computation, in a way that can transparently span a network, and dynamically and anyschronously respond to events such as state changes. With VOS, objects distributed on many computers on the Internet can be linked together into one seamless and dynamic system.

VOS serves as the core technology for Multiuser 3D Virtual Worlds, web sites, a visualization or data analytics environment, or any other application that requires dynamic display and interaction by one or more users using a network.

VOS is currently undergoing some redesign and re-implementation of libraries and applications. To be informed of future releases and other information, subscribe to the news (web forum or mailing list) or the RSS feed.

Our general mission is to create software that:

• Uses a small number of easy to learn, but powerful and flexible core concepts
• Allows direct access to many parts and levels of applications by users, with access control and authorization
• Is a free, open source platform
• Is customizable and extensible for your specific needs
• Can create adaptable, dynamic structures, allowing you to quickly change structure and behavior as needed (and as needs and design evolves over time)
• Can be used from many different programming languages
• Uses an efficient, low-latency networking protocol
• Allows programs running on different sites (hosts) to interlink to each other and share data, and present a seamless unified system to the user
• Can be connected to other existing systems, especially through open standards for protocols and data formats

Up to date documentation is still being worked on. For a few notes, and for older out-of-date documentation, see the draft documentation.

The VOS Technology

The components and applications of Interreality are based on a core technology platform: Virtual Object System (VOS).

VOS is a free open source platform for creating distributed object-oriented data structures (a distributed object system), for dynamic collaboration between applications and users. It is extensible to different kind of applications, including 3D virtual worlds, as well as web sites (this site uses it as a content management system, for example), and more.

The core concept of VOS is that of polymorphic Vobjects linking to each other to form distributed data structures, which send asynchronous messages to each other to trigger events and behaviors, or to communicate change in state. Programs using VOS can construct networks or parts of networks of objects, manipulate them, and respond to changes. Vobjects can be combined, recombined, and rearranged dynamically on-line to make changes to the system; vobjects can be used in any number of different contexts, even different applications; vobjects can exist on any network host, be running on multiple CPUs or CPU cores, in the same or different processes on one system, and be implemented in different languages, yet all be part of one interconnected system, set of subsystems, etc.. Vobjects logically operate concurrantly in multiple threads or proceses, safely and efficiently, without worrying about locks or other synchronization issues. Vobjects structure data, computation, or both, and VOS applications can take advantage of multicore hardware, and multi-computer clusters.

To make virtual worlds using VOS, a set of extension components defines object types and relationships which can describe the visual and interactive properties of a 3D scene. A viewer uses VOS and its networking protocol, VIP, to access those Vobjects and read data from them. It can also change any part of the structure, and add new objects. It can access any part of the structure remotely (subject to access control checks by the remote host) for dynamic editing and interaction, allowing for a very flexible and powerful virtual world system. The viewer is general, and can be used to access any virtual world, or any VOS application (whether it includes 3D graphics or not).

VOS or extensions provide many important features in addition to the core object management features. Including the following implemented, planned or in-progress features: version management; object replication; managing plugins or scripts on remote servers; LAN service discovery; communication with SQL databases; access through HTTP to web pages; interfacing to various programming languages in the same or different processes; authentication and access control on any operation; secure encrypted communications, and more.