Article Preview
Top2. Rendering Approaches For Mobile Devices
Many approaches have been proposed in the literature to render interactive 3D scenes on mobile devices. We can divide these approaches into three main categories (Nadalutti, Chittaro, & Buttussi, 2006):
- •
Hardware architectures for 3D rendering on mobile device,
- •
Remote 3D rendering architectures, and
- •
Software architectures for 3D rendering on mobile devices.
2.1. Hardware Architectures for 3D Rendering on Mobile Devices
For 3D rendering on mobile devices many efficient hardware architectures were proposed (Silpa, Vemuri, & Panda, 2009 ; Yu et al. 2009; Sohn, Woo, & Yoo, 2004). These architectures aim at producing high performance and low power consumption by exploiting parallelism and multithreaded co-processor concepts. Unfortunately, this approach does not provide flexibility, because new hardware architectures have to be designed for every emerging rendering technique. Moreover, if multiple, diverse applications have to be executed on the same mobile device, adding hardware accelerator for each application results in high hardware cost and more power consumption.
2.2. Remote 3D Rendering Architectures
The most common solution adopted for rendering on mobile devices is remote rendering. In this type of rendering, the process is carried out on a powerful remote computer with graphic acceleration and the results are sent to the mobile device using a wireless network. Thus, the mobile device acts as just a simple client. Chang and Ger (2002) propose a client-server system in which client can produce new images using the depth information and 3D warping without requesting more information from the server. Further, the works of Bao and Gourlay (2006); Yoo et al. (2010); Banerjee and Agu (2005); Shu et al. (2009) have one aspect in common, they all use the concept of remote rendering over wireless networks. However, a major disadvantage of remote rendering solutions is the need of a reliable and permanent wireless network that is not always available. Moreover, current wireless networks have limited bandwidth and these solutions need complex algorithms to divide processing between server and clients.
2.3. Software Architectures for 3D Rendering on Mobile Devices
Software architectures for 3D rendering carry out the entire rendering process on mobile devices. Generally it has been done using some mobile 3D graphics API such as PoketGL, Mobile 3D Graphics (M3G) etc. Zunino, Lamberti, and Sanna (2003) have adopted this approach to render 3D data completely on the mobile device. This approach provides an inexpensive way to improve the performance of the rendering process.