Am I trying to do the impossible?

Question

Many Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give :-)
I am about to embark on my university dissertation to produce a collaborative interactive learning environment which sounds hard and I want to know if its possible to produce such a application in Java. In more detail -
I want to produce a client/server application which lets clients act as avatars (actors) inside a virtual Java 3D scene which will be seen by all the clients so can see their avatar view point move. This scene will be populated by a 3d max loader which I know it�s possible.
Hope it makes sense!
Any suggestions/ideas of how I could do possibly do this would be great!
Thanks again :-)
Brenden

Answer 1

Forgot to mention I only have about 6 weeks to
design/code the application, which is a tight
deadline for the work I think I have to do, I'm quite
up-to-date with the network side tho just the 3D
programming I haven't done before.I have actually worked on an application VERY similar to this. I was modeling machines in a virtual shop floor, the scene was being completely generated on the client computers, with the only data sent over the network was the differences between the scenes. It also had a chat facility.
The main difference with what I was doing was that there were no avatars. The clients were aware of changes to the environment, but not other users in the environment.
I was using HTTP servlets for my communication, and it made sense for the type of data I was sending. You might consider sending simple explanations of what has changes, and allow the client side to construct the changes that will be needed to the scene graph. Or RMI should work too.
I will continue to monitor this thread, if you wish to post any more questions. I am quite familiar with Java3D, so I may be able to help you with that aspect of the program.
By the way, the Java3D tutorial provided by sun is pretty basic, and won't be enough to help you do this project. Personally, I have yet to find a decent tutorial that gets into advanced Java3D practices. The best way to get familiar with the package is to ask other programmers. I wouldn't spend TOO much time googling for answers, because there aren't many other there for Java3D. As a side note, this forum does have a Java3D subject you can post questions to.
- Adam