We describe the Scent-Graph-As-Bus technique (SGAB), the first step in a st
aircase of solutions for sharing software components for virtual environmen
ts. The goals of SGAB are to allow, with minimal effort, independently-desi
gned applications to share component functionality; and for multiple users
to share applications designed for single users. This paper reports on the
SGAB design for transparently conjoining different applications by unifying
the state information contained in their scene graphs. SGAB monitors and m
aps changes in the local scene graph of one application to a neutral scene
graph representation (NSG), distributes the NSG changes over the network to
remote peer applications, and then maps the NSG changes to the local scene
graph of the remote application. The fundamental contribution of SGAB is t
hat both the local and remote applications can be completely unaware of eac
h other; that is, both applications can interoperate without code or binary
modification despite each having no knowledge of networking or interoperab
ility.