What is Mobile/Portable/Hand-Held Devices

Recent improvements in technology of last generation mobile devices (smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants, Ultra-Mobile PCs) have opened up challenging new scenarios in 3-D ubiquitous visualization. Entertainment, cultural heritage, telemedicine, and distance learning are only a few of the disciplines that can take advantage of 3-D model visualization on mobile and hand-held devices. This chapter investigates the main methodologies used to display and navigate complex scenes and heavy datasets on mobile devices. Both local and remote rendering software techniques are considered with respect to solutions based on hardware acceleration. Moreover, issues related to the design of suitable graphics user interfaces are tackled. Finally, a solution for high performance visualization based on the remote rendering approach and enabling interactive manipulation of 3-D scenes composed by millions of polygons at 30 frames per second even on 50 Kbit/s wireless communication channels is presented.