Building Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) applications is a complex task. Many different technologies and algorithms from various areas of computer science need to be combined to build an application. Real-time 3D graphics, data acquisition and network communication are all active research areas that contribute basic technology to the development of DVE applications.

This thesis documents research performed during the development of the Avocado framework for distributed virtual environment applications at IMK (Institut für Medienkommunikation, GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik, Sankt Augustin), where Avocado serves as the central platform for all DVE related research projects. In this context, possible approaches to the design of a general DVE framework have been investigated and the resulting reference implementation is presented. Special attention is given to the seamless integration of distributed application semantics into the standard, stand-alone VE object and event model. Further, the limiting constraints of large-scale DVE applications are discussed and a multi-resolution approach to scalability is presented.