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Progressive Transmission of 3-D Models via the Internet

posted by Satri on Monday October 10, @04:38PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the test-my-bandwidth dept.

GeoPlace has an article about the progressive transmission of 3-D models on the Internet to improve data browsing, sharing and analysis. From the article: The most important advantage of progressive transmission methods is that they’re capable of giving users a rapid preliminary view of spatial data. Moreover, users can navigate through the data during the transmission procedure (e.g., through zooming, panning, spatial queries, etc.).

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• What's new here?

  (Score:2, Insightful)

  by Ben (62) on Tuesday October 11, @10:45PM (#107)
  ( http://vterrain.org/ )

  I recall when multi-resolution meshes were a hot subject, back around 1999 or so. Some examples: Intel had an implementation that a lot of people were excited about; i believe it went out to Macromedia. An Israeli company was pitching their multi-rez technology to everyone, with arguments on how it would radically reduce bandwidth for distributing 3D content.
  
  I haven't heard anything from any of those efforts since.
  
  I could speculate about why: generally speaking its a solution looking for a problem. Efficiently modeled polygon soups like buildings aren't conducive to dropping vertices, and are better simplified using procedural approaching. Images are already covered by a host of approaches, and elevation is most efficiently treated as a raster intead of a TIN, and hence already treatable with most of the simplification approaches available for rasters. I can't think of a situation in which you'd actually want to use a progressive-mesh TIN for anything.