Scalable Model Viewing

In this paper we describe a novel approach to displaying complex 3D scenes on architecture that does not have support for 3D graphical display. Our system makes use of distributed graphics, employing a standard workstation as a server. This server communicates with a client via UDP sockets over a LAN link. To minimize network traffic, a compression engine is employed to compress and decompress data on either side of the network transfer phase. By dividing the display into blocks, we effectively reduce the amount of data needing to be transported from client to server and provide an interactive user friendly client. We chose a PDA as a client, but our approach is extensible and easy to implement on any architecture with at least some 2D graphics drawing capabilities