Adaptive Quad Patches: an adaptive regular structure for web distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D models

We introduce an approach for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D mesh models supporting a simple quad parameterization. Our method extends and combines recent results in geometric processing, real-time rendering, and web programming. In particular: we exploit recent results on surface reconstruction and isometric parametrization to transform point clouds into twomanifold meshes whose parametrization domain is a small collection of 2D square regions; we encode the resulting parameterized meshes into a very compact multiresolution structures composed of variable resolution quad patches whose geometry and texture is stored in a tightly packed texture atlas; we adaptively stream and render variable resolution shape representations using a GPUaccelerated adaptive tessellation algorithm with negligible CPU overhead. Real-time performance is achieved on portable GPU platforms using OpenGL, as well as on exploiting emerging webbased environments based on WebGL. Promising applications of thetechnologyrangefromtheautomaticcreationofrapidlyrenderableobjectsforgamestotheset-upofbrowsable3Dmodelsrepositoriesinthewebthatwillbeaccessiblebyupcominggenerationof WebGL-enabled web browers