Towards peer-assisted rendering in networked virtual environments

This paper introduces a new technique, called peer-assisted rendering, that aims to enable interactive navigation in a 3D networked virtual environment using a resource-constrained device, by speeding up the rendering. A resource-constrained client requests part of the rendered scenes from other peers with similar viewpoints within the virtual environment, and merges the rendered parts into its own view. This approach is more scalable than previous solutions based on server-based pre-rendering. The goal of this paper is to make a strong case for the feasibility of peer-assisted rendering through the following two messages. First, by analyzing a large number of user traces from a popular virtual world called Second Life, we show that there are surprisingly many users with similar viewpoints and encompass large number of common objects in their viewing areas, indicating that a client can potentially find multiple other peers that can assist in rendering. Second, by combining three different rendering methods, each contributing to rendering of different classes of objects in the scene, we show that it is possible for a client to render the scene efficiently with little visual artifacts.