  Advances in computer networks and rendering systems facilitate the creation
of distributed collaborative environments in which the distribution of
information at remote locations allows efficient communication. One of the
challenges in networked virtual environments is maintaining a consistent view
of the shared state in the presence of inevitable network latency and jitter. A
consistent view in a shared scene may significantly increase the sense of
presence among participants and facilitate their interactivity. The dynamic
shared state is directly affected by the frequency of actions applied on the
objects in the scene. Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments
contain several types of action producers including human users, a wide range
of electronic motion sensors, and haptic devices. In this paper, the authors
propose a novel criterion for categorization of distributed MR/VR systems and
present an adaptive synchronization algorithm for distributed MR/VR
collaborative environments. In spite of significant network latency, results
show that for low levels of update frequencies the dynamic shared state can be
maintained consistent at multiple remotely located sites.
