Efficient interaction with virtual worlds over IP

The construction of photo-realistic virtual worlds is at reach of current computer graphics. Unfortunately, the philosophy currently adopted for the diffusion of virtual worlds over the Internet has a fundamental drawback: it calls for downloading at client side the 3D virtual world description. Recently, the splitbrowser approach was proposed in order to solve this issue by transforming the problem of interacting with a virtual worlds in a image transmission task. This work addresses the crucial issue of compressing the image stream generated in the split-browser approach. The proposed compression scheme first decomposes the virtual world as a union of objects, successively it approximates each object as a polyhedron and finally, it compresses the image of each face of the polyhedron by predicting it with a projective transformation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.