Impact of 3D Bookmarks on Navigation and Streaming in a Networked Virtual Environment

A 3D bookmark in a networked virtual environment (NVE) provides a navigation aid, allowing the user to move quickly from its current viewpoint to a bookmarked viewpoint by simply clicking on the bookmark. In this paper, we first validate the positive impact that 3D bookmarks have in easing navigation in a 3D scene. Then, we show that, in the context of a NVE that streams content on demand from server to client, navigating with bookmarks leads to lower rendering quality at the bookmarked viewpoint, due to lower locality of data. We then investigate into how prefetching the 3D data at the bookmarks and precomputation of visible faces at the bookmarks help to improve the rendering quality