Adapting a large scale networked virtual environment for display on a PDA

Abstract

A major trend in current entertainment applications is to provide access to a persistent large scale online virtual environment. These online environments allow users to participate in a number of activities, such as playing games, communicating with other users in the environment and creating a virtual home. In order to allow users to access the environment at any time or place, some form of online mobile access is needed using for instance a PDA or SmartPhone. In this paper, we describe how our in-house developed large scale online virtual environment was adapted for mobile access. Our main goal is to create a unified NVE framework that is capable of supporting a wide range of client devices. We discuss the main issues encountered and describe our approach for enabling mobile access to the existing virtual environment and 3D rendering on a PDA. Specifically for the 3D rendering, we use a hybrid geometry/image-based rendering approach in order to limit the memory requirements and processing power needed. Our experimental results, using both software and hardware accelerated rendering, show that this hybrid approach strikes an effective balance between image quality and rendering speed. We also demonstrate mobile access to our existing networked virtual environment using a wireless connection.