Massively multi user virtual environment (MMVE) applications must face the challenge of dealing with update message exchange among a large set of nodes distributed over the Internet. Therefore design of scalable network protocols is a major concern in such large scale distributed architectures. Several approaches have been proposed to aid update exchange in MMVEs. Message localization has always been a key point in the design of such distributed network protocols. Area of Interest Management

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... IM) mainly deals with the issues related to the update message localization with respect to the user's interest. As the number of users in the virtual environment increases, update message localization becomes more important in order to prevent transmission of a huge bulk of unnecessary update messages to uninterested users. Therefore, scalable and efficient area of interest management is a challenge in MMVE design. This paper introduces a new zone selection and distributed regional message filtering architecture for MMVE applications. We propose Delaunay tetrahedrization of the virtual environment as a good way of virtual world partitioning due to several promising features. Moreover we propose a partitioning scheme with respect to barriers in order to reach a better performance through the filtering of a group of update messages that need not be propagated over the barriers. We will also introduce a distributed interest management design based on the previous partitioning technique. Our proposed distributed message dissemination approach is capable of providing the interested users with variable updates rate according to their required Level of Detail.