Streaming of plants in distributed virtual environments

ABSTRACT

Just as in the real world, plants are important objects in virtual world for creating pleasant and realistic environments, especially those involving natural scenes. As such, much effort has been made in realistic modeling of plants. As the trend moves towards networked and distributed virtual environment, however, the current models are inadequate as they are not designed for progressive transmissions. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a progressive representation for plants based on generalized cylinders. To facilitate the transmission of the plants, we quantify the visual contribution of each branch and use this weight in packet scheduling. We show the efficiency of our representations and effectiveness of our packet scheduler through simulations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.2 Graphics Systems
          Subjects: Distributed/network graphics

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
multiresolution, networked virtual environment, plant models, progressive coding, progressive transmission, streaming