Streaming of Complex 3D Scenes for Remote Walkthroughs

We describe a new 3D scene streaming approach for remote walkthroughs. In a remote walkthrough, a user on a client machine interactively navigates through a scene that resides on a remote server. Our approach allows a user to walk through a remote 3D scene, without ever having to download the entire scene from the server. Our algorithm achieves this by selectively transmitting only small parts of the scene and lower quality representations of objects, based on the user's viewing parameters and the available connection bandwidth. An online optimization algorithm selects which object representations to send, based on the integral of a benefit measure along the predicted path of movement. The rendering quality at the client depends on the available bandwidth, but practical navigation of the scene is possible even when bandwidth is low.

• View the full Eurographics 2001 paper, (Adobe PDF, 1,051K).
• Play MPEG movies of simulated remote walkthroughs at different connection bandwidths. The scene model contains over 3.2 million polygons and it's total size is 116 MBytes.
  The first movie shows three segments from a simulated remote walkthrough across a 20000 bytes/second connection.
  The second movie shows a side-by-side comparison of 2000 bytes/second (top left), 20000 bytes/second (top right), 100000 bytes/second (bottom left), and a walkthrough rendered with full geometry of the scene (bottom right). The quality of the walkthrough at 2000 bytes/second leaves much to be desired, but at 20000 bytes/second things look much better. At 100000 bytes/second the visual quality is very similar to that of the full geometry walkthrough.
• Download Eyal Teler's MSc thesis.