ASCEND is a collective effort to construct programming libraries that will faciliate the creations of scalable, affordable, and accessible peer-to-peer (P2P)-based 3D networked virtual environments (NVEs) where participants may share data (e.g. files, photos, blogs) and interact with one another in real-time. ASCEND is based on the scalable Voronoi-based overlay network (VON) and a number of important P2P-based NVE (P2P-NVE) issues will be investigated, including: 3D streaming for P2P-NVEs, state management in P2P-NVEs, persistent storage designed for P2P-NVEs, and suitable P2P-NVE overlays. Libraries that support the above functions will be released under the GNU's Lesser General Public License (LGPL). ASCEND's motivation is based on three important Internet trends: the rising popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), the scalability potential of P2P networks, and the rapid growth of user-generated contents such as blog, file and photo sharing. We hope that ASCEND may bridge the transitions toward the next stage of Internet communication that is 3D-based, highly interactive, and user-empowering. ASCEND covers three major research topics:

1) 3D Streaming for P2P-NVE: We will investigate how real-time streaming delivery of 3D contents (geometric meshes and textures) may be done in a scalable manner by using P2P networks. We intend to devise distributed visibility determination and parallel streaming methods in order to relieve server load and to shorten client-side download time.

2) State Management in P2P-NVE: We will investigate how the synchronization of object states and event ordering may be supported in a distributed P2P environment by assigning ownerships for each object within a NVE. We intend to adopt a fully-distributed consensus-based voting mechanism for the efficient and correct determination of object owners. An update propagation mechanism that provides high availability of object states in the face of a dynamically changing environment will also be investigated.

3) Persistent Storage for P2P-NVE: We will investigate how persistent data may be supported in a P2P environment by using only a light-weight server for the eventual data backup. We intend to devise leader node election protocols and data aggregation techniques to support scheduled backups of object states without causing server overload.