Streaming HLODs: an out-of-core viewer for network visualization of huge polygon models

The constant growth of network and internet availability and speed as well as the increasing power of consumer level graphics hardware have created more and more interest in streaming transmission of three-dimensional data sets. However, since the size of such models is increasing even faster than the transmission or rendering bandwidth and has already exceeded the main memory available in common PCs, we present a combination of quasi view-dependent hierarchical level of detail (HLOD) rendering with priority-based streaming that is capable of rendering highly complex models at a real-time frame rates and high quality even with a low network bandwidth. We show the modifications needed to incorporate the streaming into a recent HLOD rendering system and explore different techniques to reduce the loss of quality compared to local out-of-core rendering. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. PACS: 89.20.Ff; 89.20.Hh