A Hybrid client-server based technique for navigation in large terrains using mobile devices

We describe a hybrid client-server technique for remote adaptive streaming and rendering of large terrains in resource-limited mobile devices. The technique has been designed to achieve an interactive rendering performance on a mobile device connected to a low-bandwidth wireless network. The rendering workload is split between the client and the server. The terrain area close to the viewer is rendered in real-time by the client using a hierarchical multiresolution scheme. The terrain located far from the viewer is portrayed as view-dependent impostors, rendered by the server on demand and, then sent to the client. The hybrid technique provides tools to dynamically balance the rendering workload according to the resources available at the client side and to the saturation of the network and server. A prototype has been built and an exhaustive set of experiments covering several platforms, wireless networks and a wide range of viewer velocities has been conducted. Results show that the approach is feasible, effective and robust.

[1]  Kari Pulli,et al.  Mobile 3D Graphics With OpenGL ES and M3G , 2007 .

[2]  Gregory K. Wallace,et al.  The JPEG still picture compression standard , 1992 .

[3]  Enrico Gobbetti,et al.  High-quality networked terrain rendering from compressed bitstreams , 2007, Web3D '07.

[4]  Mark A. Duchaineau,et al.  ROAMing terrain: Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes , 1997, Proceedings. Visualization '97 (Cat. No. 97CB36155).

[5]  Tom McREYNOLDS,et al.  Advanced Graphics Programming Using OpenGL , 2005 .

[6]  Steve Babbin.  Developing Software for Symbian OS: An Introduction to Creating Smartphone Applications in C++ (Symbian Press) , 2005 .

[7]  Sandeep Koranne.  Apache Portable Runtime (apr) , 2011 .

[8]  Raphaël Lerbour,et al.  Adaptive Streaming and Rendering of Large Terrains : A Generic Solution , 2008 .

[9]  Arie E. Kaufman,et al.  Interactive wireless virtual colonoscopy , 2007, The Visual Computer.

[10]  Steven K. Feiner,et al.  Computer graphics: principles and practice (2nd ed.) , 1990 .

[11]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  Implementation, Measurement, and Analysis of an Image-Based Virtual Environment Streaming Protocol for Wireless Mobile Devices , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

[12]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  An efficient protocol for remote virtual environment exploration on wireless mobile devices , 2008, WMuNeP '08.

[13]  Jens Schneider,et al.  GPU-Friendly High-Quality Terrain Rendering , 2006, J. WSCG.

[14]  Craig Gotsman,et al.  Visualization of large terrains in resource-limited computing environments , 1997 .

[15]  Renato Pajarola,et al.  Survey of semi-regular multiresolution models for interactive terrain rendering , 2007, The Visual Computer.

[16]  Paolo Cignoni,et al.  BDAM — Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes for High Performance Terrain Visualization , 2003, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[17]  Jihad El-Sana,et al.  Seamless patches for GPU-based terrain rendering , 2009, The Visual Computer.

[18]  Andrea Sanna,et al.  A solution for displaying medical data models on mobile devices , 2005, ICSE 2005.

[19]  Jinhong Li,et al.  Large-scale terrain rendering using strip masks of terrain blocks , 2008, 2008 7th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation.

[20]  Joachim Pouderoux,et al.  Adaptive streaming and rendering of large terrains using strip masks , 2005, GRAPHITE.

[21]  Mark A. Duchaineau,et al.  ROAMing terrain: real-time optimally adapting meshes , 1997 .

[22]  Valerio Pascucci,et al.  Terrain Simplification Simplified: A General Framework for View-Dependent Out-of-Core Visualization , 2002, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[23]  Jens Schneider,et al.  Efficient Geometry Compression for GPU‐based Decoding in Realtime Terrain Rendering , 2009, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[24]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  An end-to-end virtual environment streaming technique for thin mobile devices over heterogeneous networks , 2008, Comput. Commun..

[25]  Tom McREYNOLDS,et al.  Advanced Graphics Programming Using OpenGL (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) , 2005 .

[26]  Frank Losasso,et al.  Geometry clipmaps: terrain rendering using nested regular grids , 2004, SIGGRAPH 2004.

[27]  Azzedine Boukerche.  Handbook of Algorithms for Wireless Networking and Mobile Computing , 2005 .

[28]  James D. Davidson.  Learning Cocoa with Objective-C , 2002 .

[29]  Valerio Pascucci,et al.  Visualization of large terrains made easy , 2001, Proceedings Visualization, 2001. VIS '01..

[30]  Renato Pajarola.  Large scale terrain visualization using the restricted quadtree triangulation , 1998 .

[31]  Paolo Cignoni,et al.  C‐BDAM – Compressed Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes for Terrain Rendering , 2006, Comput. Graph. Forum.