We will look at various open source projects that may be used to accomplish our goals. Each project that comes close will have its own post referenced in this page.
The ideal project would have a client-server architecture, with the server-side part being able to handle physics and custom avatars. The client side should work on popular OSs like Windows and Linux.
The server should maintain a scene graph that it sends to clients or the interface should be simple enough to allow writing custom code to do that in a reasonable time frame. The server also needs to send streams of raw data to be used by the actor (video, audio, touch, smell). On the other hand, if there is no such project (that is likely) the server-side plug-in may decide what streams of data it sends, thus lowering the requirements of the searched project.
The client needs to allow the user to view/hear the scene independent of the actor and as the actor sees it. What we’re looking for is a world as complex as possible using as few resources as possible (because they need to be transmitted over the network, that is slow).
Here is the list of pages exploring various projects:
Apart from Google, following pages helped this survey:
