Application-level graphic streaming channel

Scene Graph APIs are used to interact at the application level with a 2D or 3D scene. Examples of such APIs are the External Authoring Interface for VRML scenes or the MPEG-J scene graph API for MPEG-4 scenes. In theory, a remote or local application could interact with the scene using these APIs. But in practice, the application is running in the scene player as a java applet or MPEGlet. This paper shows how a remote scene graph API can be implemented by defining a new graphic streaming channel at the application level. We describe a simple and compact communication protocol corresponding to this streaming channel and give some results of use of this channel. A comparison between EAI and MPEG-J scene graph is also presented.