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Multi-User, Netbased, Interactive, and more

The Knowbotic Interface Project [KIP] of the Institute for New Media [INM] offers a Multi-User Environment, which is Netbased. Depending only on the capacity of the hardware, the Knowbotic Interface [KInt] can communicate via Internet at the same time with as many users as you want. Additionally, every other type of the communication line easily can be connected to a KInt.

The KInt offers for every user a virtual world which provides a truly interactive environment: whatever can be perceived by the sense organs of the virtual body of a certain user in such a virtual world will be transmitted to that user, and whatever actions a user can perform in such a world, these actions with their effects will be computed for every location in the world. Thus, the actions of a user can `really' change the virtual world and can have some impact on other users.

This type of interaction needs a highly sophisticated collision algorithm which at any time is able to detect collisions throughout the whole virtual world with regard to the surface of all the moving objects. This is also a precondition for the mission of the knowbots of the KIP. Since knowbots rebuild the `outer' world `within their consciousness' based only on their perceptions, they need to know what type of object they are interacting with and which part of the body has been touched during a collision.

The virtual world together with the collision algorithm, is in principle, scalable, i.e. if you need more power, you can distribute the virtual world over different processors to speed up the computation. The partitioning can be done completely dynamically during runtime; you are free to select a new partitioning in every world-cycle.

Both the KInt and the knowbots of the KIP use the new technique of distributed objects. Thus, it does not matter whether you have only one machine at hand or many; for the user all the objects will appear as though they were on only one single machine. It is the operating system (at the moment we are using NEXTSTEP) which does the work of interobject-communication completely automatically for the user (and the programmer).

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