A Distributed Architecture for Searching, Retrieving and Visualizing

Mobile devices are significantly changing the human-computer interaction. In par-ticular, the ubiquitous access to remote resources is one of the most interesting characteristics achievable by using mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assis-tants, cellular phones and tablets. This paper presents an architecture that allows users to search and visualize com-plex three dimensional models over Personal Digital Assistants. A peer-to-peer net-work of brokers manages queries for searching objects among several data providers. The object selected for visualization is forwarded to a specialized graphics providers; this provider allows the users to investigate the object remotely rendering the scene and sending back to the Personal Digital Assistant the computed image. The user can interactively analyze objects that would not be otherwise visualizable locally on the Personal Digital Assistant. Key words: mobile virtual reality, 3D model visualization on Personal Digital Assistants, integration between mobile technologies and distributed architectures.