Java-based Multiresolution Streaming Mesh with QoS-like Controlling for Web Graphics

Web Graphics has become an important and new platform today, since there are more and more people that would like to have 3D graphics supports on the Web. In order to distribute 3D graphics applications from servers to clients on different platforms, a general-purpose 3D graphics library for Java called jGL is developed as the base of the 3D graphics applications for Web Graphics. To make jGL to be easy to learn and use, its API (Application Programming Interface) is designed in a manner quite similar to that of OpenGL. Therefore, the programmers who are familiar with the usage of OpenGL can use jGL intuitively since they can find one-to-one mapping functions in both of them. Besides the functions of OpenGL, jGL also supports other useful functionalities, such as Phong shading, bump mapping, environment mapping, procedural solid texturing, and VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) as its extensions. How to transmit geometric 3D models efficiently on the Internet is an important task in Web Graphics, since there are many users using geometric 3D models on the Web. The data size of a geometric 3D model is usually large to enable more detail to be represented, although the user on the Internet usually does not need to use such a detailed model in most cases. Hence, it is necessary to represent the 3D model while keeping the data size small and preserving the shape and features, even if the meshes that constitute the model are unstructured. Therefore, we proposed a reversible multiresolution streaming mesh for these requirements. The mesh simplification algorithm used for generating the streaming mesh is different from other mesh simplification methods. In order to preserve the shape and features of the original model, we first detect the features of the 3D model before simplifying it, so our approach has no over-simplification problem, which is a common problem of other methods. Even the meshes consisted by the model is unstructured; our method can also get a good result efficiently. Moreover, since the network bandwidth of the Internet is not stable actually, how much data is suitable for representing a 3D model on the Web is also a question. Hence, a QoS-like (Quality of Service) QoS-like (Quality of Service) controlling mechanism is also proposed with the reversible multiresolution streaming mesh. Additionally, a VRML library and an adaptive method of procedural solid texturing for supporting the applications of Web Graphics are also provided to be the extensions of jGL. The main idea of the proposed procedural solid texturing method is to use the cache mechanism to store the calculated texture data; hence the computational cost can be reduced. This method solves two main problems of previous procedural solid texturing methods. One is the run-time performance problem due to the computational cost, and the other is the storage problem since to create a 3D-texture image as texture mapping needs a lot of storage spaces. Therefore, our approach can show a 3D model with procedural solid texturing with no such problems. In this dissertation, a prototype of transmitting 3D geometric models on the Internet has been proposed. In order to provide this client/server system for Web Graphics, we contributed from a 3D graphics library as a development environment to a total solution to establish the system including mesh simplification, transmission, and reconstruction. Furthermore, a real-time shading method of procedural solid texturing which can be used on the Web and two model deformation methods are also proposed to support this model transmitting prototype.