Eventually there will exist virtual environments inhabited by millions, but as virtual environments grow in size and number of entities, many problems emerge. Because of these problems, increasing attention is being brought to the issue of filtering data that is not of interest to a given client. Such filtering is known as interest management. This dissertation outlines a Three Tiered approach to interest management. The first tier breaks the world into manageable pieces. The second tier uses the data from the first to create a protocol independent perfect match between a client's interests and the environment. The third tier, building on the second, adds protocol dependence allowing the client to receive only the data from the protocol it needs. At the same time, separating out the protocol from the core interest management can allow multiple protocols to simultaneously exist within the same environment, while using the same underlying filtering mechanism. Results from this work have shown that it is possible to create an interest management software architecture that allows bandwidth, packets per second, and CPU time to scale dependent only on the number of entities a given client is interested in at any one time.
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