VWRAP Charter

Working Group Name:

Virtual Worlds Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP)

Chairs:

TBD

Area and Area Directors:

Applications Area

Lisa Dusseault <lisa.dusseault@gmail.com>

Alexey Melnikov <alexey.melnikov@isode.com>

Responsible Area Director:

TBD

Mailing List:

ogpx@ietf.org http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ogpx

Description of Working Group:

The working group will define the Virtual Worlds Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP) for collaborative 3-dimensional virtual environment. The protocol permits users to interact as digital representations called "avatars". Avatars exist in at most one location within a shared virtual space. Conforming client applications use the protocol to manipulate and move the user's avatar, create virtual objects, interact with other users and their surroundings, consume and create media and information from sources inside and outside their simulated environment.

Adjacent points in virtual spaces accessible by this protocol may be explicitly partitioned into "regions" to facilitate the computational and communication load balancing required to simulate the virtual environment. Such virtual environments may consist of regions administered by distinct organizations. Regions provide the service endpoints for interacting with the inhabitants and objects they contain. Regions uniquely represent their partition of the virtual space (that is, they are not a "sharding" mechanism). The state of a virtual world is independent of the client applications that access it and may persist between user sessions.

Regions and other services implemented according to the specifications may be deployed by separate organizations with varying policies and trust domains. The VWRAP protocol will provide the mechanisms for these virtual world services to interoperate, when permitted by policy and shared trust domains. To support the exegesis of the specifications, the group may define a non-exhaustive set of non-normative policies protocol participants may enforce.

Foundational components of the protocol include the publication of:

an abstract type system, suitable for describing the application protocol in an implementation neutral manner,
a security model describing trust relationships between participating entities,
guidelines for the use of existing authentication and confidentiality mechanisms,
an application-layer protocol for establishing the user's avatar in a region,
an application-layer protocol for changing an avatar's position, including moving between regions,
format descriptions for objects and avatars, and
an application-layer protocol for identifying entities, and requesting information about them.

The protocol defined by this group will carry information about the virtual environment, its contents and its inhabitants. It is an application layer protocol, independent of transport, based partially on these previously published internet drafts:

The protocol should describe interaction semantics independent of transport, leveraging existing standards where practical. It should define interoperability expectations for server to server interactions as well as client-server interactions. Though the protocol is independent of transport, early interoperability trials used HTTP(S) for non-real-time messages. The working group will define specific features that must be replicated in other transports and will define the use of HTTP(S) as a transport of protocol messages.

Goals and Milestones:

October 2009 "Introduction and Goals" to the IESG as an Informational RFC
October 2009 "Abstract Type System for the Transmission of Dynamic Structured Data" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
October 2010 "Foundational Concepts and Transport Expectations" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
February 2010 "Guidelines for Host Authentication" to the IESG as an Informational RFC
February 2010 "Service Establishment" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
February 2010 "Client Application Launch Message" to the IESG as an Informational RFC
February 2010 "Simulation Presence Establishment" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
June 2010 "Primitive Object Format" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
June 2010 "Digital Asset Access" to the IESG as Proposed Standard
June 2010 "Entity Identifiers" to the IESG as Proposed standard

VWRAP Charter

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