It is meant as an experimental platform for developing multi-user interactive environments. Data in DIVE is arranged into objects , and the objects are formed into a hierarchical structure. There is a root object, or world, in which all other objects exist as children at some level. DIVE world descriptions can be stored on disk in text files. When the first client connects to the world, it reads the world description from the disk file.
Subsequent clients receive the world state over the network.
The world is then maintained by update messages sent between clients, to communicate changes. Scripts are distributed along with the objects themselves, and execute on all clients. To distribute data from Tcl scripts, explicit use of DIVE properties. While DIVE is designed as a platform for mostly academical use, the goal of Verse is to be able to use it as a general-purpose 3D distribution framework. This requires, among other things, that there is some kind of security.