RESTful Massively Multi-User Virtual Environments: A Feasibility Study

The increased bandwidth made available to consumers in the past decade has enabled the spread of Massively Multi-user Virtual Environments (MMVEs). MMVEs require fast and frequent updates to be delivered to a considerable number of users. To address these difficult requirements, developers resort to network architectures tightly coupling clients and servers. While providing a good enough quality of experience, these architectures often compromise scalability and fault tolerance, and limit the design of user interactions and gameplay. To gain scalability and fault tolerance back, we investigate the possibility of developing MMVEs using the REST principles. Our theoretical and experimental results show that MMVEs can be built in a REST style, providing that new data management systems are developed.