Virtual Globe on the Android - Remote vs. Local Rendering

Abstract

Two approaches are presented and compared for developing a lightweight three-dimensional terrain visualization, i.e. virtual globe application, for mobile devices. Android was chosen as the target platform. The first approach relies completely on remote rendering by a rendering server running NASA WorldWind Java SDK, and streaming the resulting frames to the mobile client. The second approach uses a scaled-down version of the geographical data to locally render a small area, and displays the rest of the visible landscape with an impostor box. Visual quality and network requirements of both versions are studied and compared to the full version of the WorldWind Java SDK.