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Peer-to-Peer 3D Streaming
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Virtual worlds have become very popular in recent years, with trends toward larger worlds and more user-generated content. The growth of 3D content in virtual worlds will make real-time content streaming (or 3D streaming) increasingly attractive for developers. To meet the demands of a large user base while lowering costs, peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery holds the promise for a paradigm shift in how future virtual worlds will be deployed and used. The authors define both the problem and solution spaces for P2P 3D streaming - by outlining its requirements and challenges - and categorize existing proposals.
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... In this P2P paradigm, peers can cache and transfer data cooperatively to reduce server workload and improve streaming quality in DVE applications [4]. In the past decade, P2P based scenes transmission schemes in DVEs have been extensively studied [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. FLoD [4] and its subsequent work [5], called Enhanced-FLoD, are two representative systems on P2P based transmission for real-time walk-through in DVEs on the Internet. ...
... The piece prioritization should joint consider the efficiency of transmission and rendering. Chien etc. proposed a piece prioritization mechanism based on Level-of-Details (LoD) of these pieces [10,11]. In this method, every object is divided into a base piece and many refinement pieces, and the downloading order is prioritized with two considerations: i) visual contribution of the piece and ii) object proximity in the virtual world. ...
... Due to the demand for more realistic worlds, networked virtual environments (NVEs) have become larger and more dynamic. Currently, almost all massively multi-user online games (MMOGs) [10,11] require users to install the entire 3D content used for game operation on their local machines priory, due to the large data volume that easily extends to over hundreds and even 1,000 of megabytes. However, prior installations are undesirable and even unpractical under two likely future scenarios: ...
... The possibility to stream audio and video has been crucial in their widespread popularity. Similarly, when broadband networks and 3D acceleration cards were adopted by average users, streaming delivery of 3D data [11,17] began to appear as viability, raising hopes for the widespread adoption of 3D content streaming for various 3D virtual environments. ...
The development of networked virtual environment (NVE) over the Internet has become more predominant with a very rich 3D interactive computer graphics. Therefore, the effective rendering of 3D scenes with necessary interactions in the client machine has become the need of the hour. The well-established techniques for video and audio streaming which are already in place have become the primary inspiration to focus our research toward 3D static scene streaming (3DS3). In this approach, the part of a demanded 3D data alone is brought to the client based on the interactions subject to the bandwidth and memory capacity. The main objective is to reduce the streaming and rendering time, that is, overall turnaround time (TT). The well-proven concept of multi-threading and serialization processes along with the predictive model is adapted in this work to achieve the stated objective. The experimental results and analysis carried out affirm that there is a remarkable reduction in rendering latency and streaming time with the serialization and multi-threading predictive framework.
... Utilizing level of details crossing networked environment is practical. Flow Level of Detail (FLoD) proposed by (Hu et. al, 2008) (Shun-Yun et. al, 2010) leverages Peer to Peer (P2P) network delivering level of details of the 3D objects. Though the concept of Level of Detail (LoD) is different in computer graphic context compared to spatial data standard, e.g. City Geographical Markup Language (CityGML); the idea of view frustum determining level of details could be improvised to allow e ...
Web services utilizations in Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) have been well established and standardized by Open Geospatial 3D graphics rendering has been a topic of interest among scientific domain from both computer science and geospatial science. Different methods were proposed and discussed in these researches for different domains and applications. Each method provides advantages and trade-offs. Some methods proposed image based rendering for 3D graphics and ultimately. This paper attempts to discuss several techniques from past researches and attempts to propose another method inspired from these techniques, customized for 3D SDI its data workflow use cases.
... Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures were proposed as cheaper, alternative approaches to the traditional client/server (C/S) architecture [1,10] in distributed virtual environments [12,20] and 3D streaming applications [3,8,9]. These architectures inherently yield lower infrastructure costs and higher scalability than the C/S scheme, but they cannot guarantee a continuous availability of all the information, because it is distributed among several peers, which are expected to constantly leave or join the network in an unpredictable way. ...
Interactive 3D terrain visualization plays an important role in multiple networked applications like virtual worlds visualization, multiplayer games or distributed simulators. Since the client/server architecture has obvious scalability limitations, different peer-to-peer schemes have been proposed as trade-off solutions that yield good robustness, availability and scalability for this kind of systems. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid distributed architecture that significantly improves the scalability and performance of the existing proposals. The proposed scheme redesigns the relationships between the different elements of a hybrid architecture, modifies the information shared by each client with its neighboring peers and varies the messages exchanged among them, providing a larger number of users with a fluid navigation experience over a large virtual terrain.
Supporting the huge amount of network traffic from three-dimensional (3-D) streaming is an extremely important challenge, as 3-D streaming has the potential to cause network congestion and longer waiting times. These problems can also lead to 3-D video being blurred, and negatively affecting the user experience. This article uses the front camera of a mobile device to track a user's viewing angle, and then calculates the currently needed 3-D stream to find the most suitable peer for video source supply. This article also considers several impact factors to choose supply partners with different data flow via fuzzy theory. Consequently, the proposed method is able to determine the best way to download the desired 3-D stream without unnecessary congestion, thus maintaining the overall peer-to-peer network quality. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the quantity of the video flow, while maintaining video quality, thus avoiding bottlenecks like bandwidth and network speed.
The rapid development of Virtual Environments (VEs) gives rise to its prominent performance in a myriad of multimedia applications. Accompanied by this is the increasingly massive data used for ascending user’s visual experience. Recently, 3D streaming makes it viable to put VEs into real-time use through progressive transmission. Nonetheless, downloading VEs over inevitable lossy networks still remains a major bottleneck that urgently needs to be solved. In this paper, we propose a three-stage progressive transmission scheme for VEs over lossy networks, which aims to minimize distortion even when encountering poor network condition. The first stage is the Pre-coding Stage that offers the most feasible transmission scheme for subsequent transmission, in this stage we combine the advanced interest management algorithm and our proposed scene distortion estimation algorithm to bring up a scene update strategy which takes the user’s visual features, quality of the scene and bandwidth estimation into account, so as to determine the download priority comprehensively. In the following Transmitting Stage, we apply Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to make sure that we convey the essential information. More importantly, we adopt expanding window fountain (EWF) codes to provide an unequal error protection (UEP) for data with different importance. Eventually in the third After-process Stage, we employ a geometry prediction algorithm for the scenario with packet loss. The final results of our experiments show that the three-stage scheme can offer preeminent visual experience especially when it comes to a relatively inferior network condition.
At present, the WebVR technology based on mobile Internet is becoming more and more mature, but there is relatively little research on P2P transmission of WebVR scene data between mobile web pages. For the past WebTorrent scheme, the concept of interest domain and avatar behavior grouping is not considered, but only pure P2P transmission problem is considered. On the one hand, a more scalable WebVR peer-to-peer transmission platform is implemented based on PeerJS, on the other hand, considering the behavioral characteristics of WebVR avatars, a WebVR interest domain partitioning method based on user attribute recommendation algorithm is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has good results for WebVR peer-to-peer transmission.
Contemporary distributed virtual environments are growing out of terabytes of 3D content and hundreds of thousands of users. Server–client architectures have become inadequate for fulfilling the scalability requirements. The peer‐to‐peer architectures provide inherently scalable, cost‐effective distributed solutions for distributed virtual environments. We present a fully distributed peer‐to‐peer framework, Phaneros, which is capable of providing necessary means to realize more efficient and more scalable massive distributed virtual environments. Using the presented visibility‐aware interest management, Phaneros performs better than existing overlays, achieving single‐hop update dissemination while having lower bandwidth requirements. The provided visibility‐aware 3D streaming scheme distributes 3D content more efficiently without creating any significant load on the server. Our test results show significant improvements over existing frameworks. Red peer is publishing a query for content in Cell A which is visible to Green peer and Blue peer. Green and Blue peers receive the query through the topic which they are subscribed to. Peers do not see each other but their AOIs intersect and allow the querying. Key findings •Phaneros provides fully distributed peer-to-peer update dissemination and content streaming for Distributed Virtual Environments. •Phaneros uses Potentially Visible Sets for Area of Interest Management. •Phaneros significantly reduces update dissemination and content distribution costs.
3D content streaming and rendering system has attracted a significant attention from both academia and industry. However, these systems struggle to provide comparable quality to that of locally stored and rendered 3D data. Since the rendered 3D content on to the client machine is controlled by the users, their interactions have a strong impact on the performance of 3D content streaming and rendering system. Thus, considering user behaviours in these systems could bring significant performance improvements. Towards the end, we propose a decision tree that captures all parameters making part of user interactions. The decision trees are built from the information found while interacting with various types of 3D content by different set of users. In this, the 3D content could be static or dynamic 3D object/scene. We validate our model through another set of interactions over the 3D contents by same set of users. The validation shows that our model can learn the user interactions and is able to predict several interactions helping thus in optimizing these systems for better performance. We also propose various approaches based on traces collected from the same/different users to accelerate the learning process of the decision tree.
In this paper we present a new progressive texture map (PTM) format that encodes the mipmap levels of a texture map into a compact and progressive way. In order to man-age these PTMs for a purpose of remote visualisation of architectural 3D scenes, we make use of a space subdivi-sion and a visibility computation algorithm that are per-formed in a preprocessing step. In addition to this prepro-cessing, we precompute a metric which is used during the navigation to select the texture mipmap levels to be down-loaded and those to be added/removed to/from the graphics hardware memory. Thanks to these mechanisms, we gen-erate and visualize scalable databases for architectural 3D scenes that contain a large number of high resolution tex-ture maps. The visualisation system we propose is based on a client/server architecture and allows for the transmis-sion and the visualization of 3D scenes using either a re-mote server connected via low bandwidth networks or a local server. In addition our system automatically adapts to the power of the client machine.
Interactive 3D contents on the Internet have yet become popular due to their large data volume and the limited network bandwidth. Progressive content transmission, or 3D streaming, thus is necessary for real-time content interactions and manipulations. However, the heavy data and processing requirements of 3D streaming challenge the scalability of current client-server-based delivery methods. We propose the use of peer- to-peer (P2P) networks to make 3D streaming more scalable and affordable, so that interactive 3D contents may see wider adoptions. We also describe a conceptual model and a design framework, called FLoD, for P2P-based 3D streaming that supports multi- user networked virtual environments (NVEs) such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). FLoD allows clients to obtain relevant 3D data from other clients while minimizing server resource usage. Evaluation of FLoD through simulations shows that P2P-based 3D streaming can be fundamentally more scalable than existing client-server approaches.
In this paper, we consider a real-time MPEG-4 streaming architecture to facilitate remote visualization of large scale 3D models on thin clients, which denote most of the hand-held devices that have limited computing resources. MPEG-4 serves as a key component to handle the compression, transmission, and visualization of the high-end supercomputer rendered image sequence, allowing the synchronization of the data in both the terminal and the server. The MPEG-4 encoding speed is thus the bottleneck of the system, in particular, the motion estimation process takes more than half of the total encoding time. We propose a fast motion estimation algorithm that expedites the MPEG-4 encoding process. Our algorithm utilizes the 3D data available at the server and is able to directly calculate the motion vector on a block basis without having to employ the expensive MPEG motion searching procedure. In addition, our algorithm can be implemented on the Graphic Processor Units(GPUs) such that most of the motion estimation process can be done in parallel to the encoding process. Our preliminary results show that the proposed motion estimation is able to significantly speed up the encoding process while maintaining the encoding quality.
This paper describes a robust mechanism for transmitting 3D meshes over the Internet. TCP/IP is an excellent means for reliable trans-port over the Internet. However, multi-user, real-time graphics ap-plications may find TCP transmission disadvantageous when re-ception of a mesh is time-critical. To improve speed one could use an unreliable transmission protocol. Yet typical mesh compression schemes increase the fragility of the mesh to lossy transmission. In this paper, we develop a hybrid method of transmitting meshes over the Internet, built upon progressive mesh [17] technology. The hy-brid method transmits important visual detail in a lossless manner, but trades off loss of visually less important detail for transmission speed. Tests of the method in a lossy network environment show that the method improves the transmission time of the mesh with little degradation in quality.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become very popular in massively multiplayer games (MMGs). While P2P gaming offers high scalability compared to client/server architectures, it introduces several major issues related to data distribution and game state consistency. In this paper, we report our initial version of VoroGame, a P2P architecture for MMGs that addresses these issues by combining a structured P2P overlay based on a distributed hash table (DHT) for data distribution, with a Voronoi diagram used for virtual game world decomposition and semantic overlay support. The resulting hybrid architecture enables a fully distributed management of data and state information, and ensures efficient dissemination of game state updates to relevant peers.
Most massively multiplayer game servers employ static partitioning of their game world into distinct mini-worlds that are hosted on separate servers. This limits cross-server interactions between players, and exposes the division of the world to players. We have designed and implemented an architecture in which the partitioning of game regions across servers is transparent to players and interactions are not limited to objects in a single region or server. This allows a finer grain partitioning, which combined with a dynamic load management algorithm enables us to better handle transient crowding by adaptively dispersing or aggregating regions from servers in response to quality of service violations. Our load balancing algorithm is aware of the spatial locality in the virtual game world. Based on localized information, the algorithm balances the load and reduces the cross server communication, while avoiding frequent reassignment of regions. Our results show that locality aware load balancing reduces the average user response time by up to a factor of 6 compared to a global algorithm that does not consider spatial locality and by up to a factor of 8 compared to static partitioning.
For PC and even mobile device, video and image streaming technologies, such as H.264 and JPEG/JPEG 2000, are already mature. However, the streaming technology for 3D model or so-called mesh data is still far from practical use. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a mesh streaming method based on JPEG 2000 standard and integrate it into an existed multimedia streaming server, so that our mesh streaming method can directly benefit from current image and video streaming technologies. In this method, the mesh data of a 3D model is first converted into a JPEG 2000 image, and then based on the JPEG 2000 streaming technique, the mesh data can then be transmitted over the Internet as a mesh streaming. Furthermore, we also extend this mesh streaming method for deforming meshes as the extension from a JPEG 2000 image to a motion JPEG 2000 video, so that our mesh streaming method is not only for transmitting a static 3D model but also a 3D animation model. To increase the usability of our method, the mesh stream can also be inserted into a X3D scene as an extension node of X3D. Moreover, since this method is based on the JPEG 2000 standard, our system is much suitable to be integrated into any existed client-server or peer-to-peer multimedia streaming system.
The hours and intensity with which players engage in games makes for very fast consumption of content. Players rapidly feel out the design space of games, requiring creators to adopt strategies to provide tremendous amounts of content for the user to experience (Final Fantasy); make the content reusable enough to provide extended replay value (GTA3, Gran Turismo); or make the experience dependent upon direct interaction with other human players (Quake, Ultima Online). Persistent-world online games are similarly differentiated by their ability to put tremendous amounts of frequently updated interactive content in front of users. Games which offer 100 hours of content exploration can easily be exhausted by the player in the first month or even weeks of play-making it a real challenge to extract a monthly subscription fee to stay in the environment.
BitTorrent is arguably the most popular media file distribution protocol used in Internet today. Even though empirically BitTorrent seems to be both efficient and scalable, there has been very little research on the detailed dynamics of its built-in control mechanisms, and their effectiveness across a wide variety of network configurations and protocol parameters. The main goal of this paper is to answer the question of how close BitTorrent is to the optimum, and indirectly how much room there is for further performance optimizations. We develop a centrally scheduled file distribution (CSFD) protocol that can provably minimize the total elapsed time of a one-sender-multiple-receiver file distribution task, and perform a comprehensive comparison between BitTorrent with CSFD. In addition, we compare several peer selection algorithms and analyze the applicability of BitTorrent to real-time streaming applications.