Progressive streaming of textured 3D models in a web browser

Abstract

The introduction of the WebGL API for rendering 3D graphics within the browser has boosted the development of 3D Web applications. However, even with the increase of available network bandwidth, delivering 3D content on the Web still suffers from latency. An efficient way to remove the latency is to compress the 3D content in a way that allows streaming and progressive decoding i.e. by generating levels of detail (LoDs). Several solutions have been proposed for such progressive delivery of 3D web content [Ponchio and Dellepiane 2015], however they are mostly suitable for geometric information only, while most of 3D assets also own textures. The multiresolution representation and compression of textured meshes are actually difficult problems, which involve too main issues: (1) how to deal with texture seams during the LoD generation and (2) how to optimally multiplex mesh and texture LoDs in order to optimize the visual fidelity of the multi-resolution representation. In this context, we introduce a progressive compression algorithm for progressive visualization of textured 3D models on the Web.