IFIP – HPN ‘98 1 High-Performance Online Presentation of Complex 3D Scenes

Online presentation of virtual 3D objects in the Web, based on Internet standards, is limited due to several performance bottlenecks, quality restrictions and missing functionality. Particularly in the scientific context, where high-performance client, server, and network equipment exists, and requirements for high complexity of represented 3D geometry are given – e. g. in the case of scientific visualization of large datasets – the potential performance of such scenario is not utilized. This paper describes the concept, implementation and evaluation of an optimized viewer, based on a new 3D stream format. The design of this 3D representation and the strategies realized in the viewer were tuned for efficiency, especially to take advantage of high bitrates to obtain short latency. This leaded to the feasibility of streaming sequences of 3D objects, applying the „Real Time Streaming Protocol “ (RTSP) to enable on-the-fly presentation as a 3D movie, freely navigatable at the client side, using virtual reality methods, such as stereoscopic presentation in conjunction with tracking systems