An efficient protocol for remote virtual environment exploration on wireless mobile devices

Abstract

The exploration of virtual environments in wireless mobile media devices has attracted the attention of researchers and developers mainly due to its potential applications in a variety of areas including entertainment, training, security, e-learning, etc. However, current technology of mobile devices lack the proper resources to handle complex and realistic 3D virtual environments. There has been a number of proposed ideas to solve this issue. The existing approaches use techniques that either employ limited user navigation modes or do not perform satisfactorily for interactive applications. In this paper, we propose a new protocol that offers the user a richer navigation by pre-streaming the necessary imagery data to generate new views as the user wanders within the 3D environment. We introduce the idea of key partial panoramas, i.e., panorama segments that cover movements in any direction by simply strafing from an appropriate key partial panorama and streaming the amount of lost pixels. We have implemented our ideas and evaluated it against two well-known approaches. Experimental results show that our solution outperforms the selected approaches by minimizing the delay between image updates and by allowing a more complex navigation scheme than previous works.