In this paper, the dead - reckoning and convergence techniques used to determine the global state of multi user distributed virtual worlds are described, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of their use in the development of this type of applications. One of the main problems of the multi user distributed virtual worlds applications is the time that image generation and update takes in each one of the virtual worlds of the computers of the participant users providing the illusion that all of them are seeing the same objects and are interacting within a unique transparent space. Generally, this time is too long in this type of applications because of the amount of information that must be transmitted through the network and it´s consequences (high latencies). As shown in this paper, the techniques of dead - reckoning and convergence allow to improve these characteristics and partially solve the problem.