Architecture

LookingGlass Architecture
is organized around a World. The World holds Regions which hold Entitys that are in the regions. One or more Comm modules communication with some virtual world service and place Entities into the Regions. There are one or more Viewers which watch the world and display the Entities therein.

The current version of has one Comm module which talks Linden Lab Legacy Protocol ("LLLP") and one Viewer that uses a Renderer which uses the Ogre 3D rendering library. Future expansions will have communication for other virtual worlds as well as viewers and renderers for other libraries and displays.

The interface to the components is through REST/JSON interfaces. For instance, Comm.LLLP has an interface that allows logging in and out as status for a connection to such virtual worlds. Other parts of make their status available through such interfaces (see the LookingGlass.Rest routines).

's internal structure is to have classes that present a server/renderer independent representation of a world filled with regions and entities. The implementation independent classes are backed by renderer and server dependent sub-classes that connect and convert that data from the server. Because the renderer needs to be tightly tied to the server data formats, the server specific portions of the renderer reach back into the server specific sub-classes and convert the data for the renderer. Below is a diagram of some of the classes and sub-classes that initially implement this structure.



Region
The world is made up of Regions. The name "region" should not imply that it is a particular geographic or spacial unit although it can be used that way (in the LL world, for instance). The general definition of a region is a collection of entities. A region has a base world coordinate and the entities in that region are relative to the base of the region. Regions can overlap so, for instance, a set of regions with identical base coordinates can be used to classify entities in a spacial area.

Regions have a level-of-detail ("LOD"). A RegionManager (note: as of 20091011, there is not yet a RegionManager implementation) acts on the regions in the world to change to level-of-detail for the regions. The effect is usually to keep regions close to the agent in high level-of-detail while making regions far away from the agent low level-of-detail. This LOD information passes through the viewer into the renderer to load and unload the displayed objects in the regions.

Entity
The Entity is the basic thing in the world. An entity might have a high level type (basic, avatar) but most of an entity's character comes from its contexts. Each Entity has a Region Context (the space unit it is in) and an Asset Context (the asset system to resolve this entity's needs).

Additionally, an Entity is decorated with additional attributes -- objects can be added by modules to track the module specific state of the Entity. For instance, Renderer.Ogre adds an Ogre::SceneNode pointer to the Entity when it is displayed in the world.

One of the difficult architectural questions is how to pass virtual world specific information (3d object definition, for instance) from Comm to the Renderer without muddling up the World with many implementation specific variables. The combination of the contexts and additional attributes allows Comm to build an Entity with implementation specific information that can be transparently passed through the world and used by the Renderer if it understands them.

World Module
The world is a container who manages a collection of Entities. World will manage creation and destruction of Entities -- it has the job of managing the local store of virtual world storage.

The World implements Regions which are 3D areas which contain the Entities. Entities within a Region are managed as a group (destroyed all at once, for instance) but there is no presumption about the size or overlapping of Regions. For instance, it would be completely possible to have two Regions which overlapped and each holding some of the Entities that appear in a particular 3D space. Comm.LLLL implements a simulator region as a region thus creating a grid of non-overlapping land areas.

Communication Module
The Comm module's job is talking with an external virtual world, receiving information about entities to display in the client, creating the proper Entity object and placing it in the World. Comm does not have any knowledge about how an Entity might be displayed. It only performs the actions of creating and managing Entities it places in the world.

Agent
There is a concept of an agent who is focus of display and action in the world. The location of the agent is used for the level-of-detail calculations for entity display.

Framework
All components exist within a framework of services.

User Interface
is controlled through several HTTP/REST/JSON interfaces which return statistics and change the operation of the viewer. The interfaces are all accessed via HTTP GET and POST operations which store and return JSON formatted messages. The sections below describe the format of the messages.


 * Statistics
 * Chat
 * Login and Logout
 * Active Avatars

When is invoked, command line parameters can be specified as described on the User Interface page.

Other Topics

 * Entity Naming