What is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

A very important aspect in the development of systems that allow access to virtual environments is their architecture, along with both the requirements and the type of offered services, once they significantly affect the design of an application. The concept of architecture refers to how the components that constitute a software system are arranged, their interfaces and relationships. Thus, this chapter aims to present and discuss different architectures that can be used in the development of 3D virtual environments. The first architecture addresses issues about the design of virtual environments for educational purposes with the goal of making collaborative e-learning services available. The second architecture proposes a modular structure for the development of 3D virtual environments that support collaboration, remote experiments and content adaptation. Lastly, the third architecture presents issues related to the sharing and management of 3D virtual environments, making use of software reuse techniques combined with web services.