Accessing Multi-user Virtual Worlds over IP

The construction of photo-realistic virtual worlds is at reach of current computer graphics. Unfortunately, the philosophy currently adopted for the diffusion of virtual worlds over the Internet, which calls for downloading at client side the 3D virtual world description, does not allow several user to share the same virtual world. Recently, in order to solve this issue, the split-browser approach was proposed. This work suggests a compression scheme for the stream of images generated in the splitbrowser approach. The proposed scheme decomposes the virtual world as a union of objects which are in turn approximated as polyhedrons. The image of each face of the polyhedron is compressed with a MPEG-like approach by predicting it by means of a projective transformation.