Living Worlds (LW) is a Working Group of the VRML Consortium, supported by a
large number of organizations. The LW effort aims to define a set of VRML 2.0
conventions that support applications which are multiuser and interoperable.
“Scenesharing", which is concerned with the coordination of events
and actions across the network, is one of the main elements of LW. In short,
LW is a first attempt to devise a common VRML 2.0 interface to support basic
interaction in multi-user virtual scenes and enables each participant to know
that someone has arrived, departed, sent a message or changed something in the
scene.
Although LW specifies rules for object sharing and exchanging
update messages across the network, it is not a communications middleware
and the reason it is being presented in this section is that it is also not
concerned with graphics and rendering. In fact LW does not care about the actual
technical implementation of the communications system that enables world sharing.
Referred to as the Multi User Technology (MuTech), the actual system that runs
on the network and is responsible for message passing among clients can be developed
by any technology as long as its interface to the VRML world follows the LW
specifications. Currently no implementations of LW are publicly available.