Anthony Steed(1), Emmanuel Frecon(2), Gareth Smith(3), Duncan Pemberton(3) and Anneli Avatare(2) 

(1) University College London, UK

(2) Swedish Institute of Computer Science

(3) Lancaster University, UK

Travel can certainly be a stressful experience, and it is an activity that is difficult to prepare for in advance. Although maps, routes and landmarks can be memorised, the traveller does not get much sense of the spatial layout of the city and can easily get confused when they arrive. There is little doubt that virtual reality can assist in such situations, by, for example, providing walkthroughs of virtual cityscapes to effect route learning.

The London Travel demonstrator consists of four main geometric and functional layers:

• A 16x10km model of the center of London

• Simulations of public transport and crowds
• Collaboration services for us by groups
• Tourist information data visualisation service

 These services are built upon the Distributed Virtual Environment (DIVE) software from SICS[1]. In this paper we describe how the application was built, how it exploits the underlying collaboration services, and how the platform provides for scalability both in terms of the large extent and detail of this application and in the number of participants it can support.

1.E. Frecon and M. Stenius, "DIVE: A Scalable network architecture for distributed virtual environments", Distributed Systems Engineering Journal (special issue on Distributed Virtual Environments), Vol. 5, No. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 91-100.