Deim Seminar
Title
Playing together with 4 Billion People: Creating Large-Scale Modifiable Virtual Worlds for Digital S
Conferenciant
Jesse Donkervliet
Professor/a organitzador/a
Pedro Garcia
Institution
Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam
Date
06-09-2024 10:00
Summary
Abstract:
Worldwide, over 4 billion people (50%!) play digital games. These games, and their underlying virtual worlds, provide a wide range of societal benefits such as entertainment, education, social activism, and a way for people to connect with others. The emergence of new kinds of virtual worlds, and new hardware platforms, have fostered a renewed interest in the creation of a metaverse, which, although lacking a generally accepted technical definition, communicates the idea of using virtual worlds in novel ways to further benefit society at large. In this talk, I focus on my PhD research, in which I work on a core challenge in realizing this goal: the scalability of modifiable virtual environments (MVEs). MVEs are a type of virtual world that give users control over the environment, allowing them to modify, or even program, their virtual environments with fine granularity and create their own worlds—an important requirement for a metaverse. However, providing these features is not free, and introduces new challenges in system scalability, performance variability, and other important non-functional properties. As an example, these challenges cause Minecraft, the most well-known MVE with more than 100 million active monthly players, to limit the number of simultaneous players in a single world to just 10(!). Join my talk to learn more about what makes MVEs difficult to scale, and how we can address these challenges for societal benefit.
Bio:
Jesse Donkervliet is a teacher and PhD student at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. He received his master's thesis in Computer Science from TU Delft in 2018 and worked as a full-time teacher at TU Delft in the same year. He enjoys teaching and has been doing it ever since. He teaches several Computer Systems courses in the Computer Science bachelor and master programs at VU Amsterdam and has worked with more than 25 bachelor and master students. In his research, Jesse works on large-scale online gaming, with a focus on modifiable virtual environments and metaverse systems. He published articles on these topics in international conferences including ICDCS, HotCloud, and ICPE. Jesse is also an avid gamer, and recently finished Baldur's Gate 3 (partially made in Barcelona, Spain!). He lives in Almere, Netherlands, with his wife and two cats.
Place
Laboratori 231
Language
Anglès
