Remote view-dependent isosurface visualization

This paper presents a simple and effective protocol for remote isosurface visualization. The protocol breaks up the isosurface visualization pipeline at the 3D primitive stage for the server to send primitives to the client. Several techniques are used in the protocol to reduce communication requirement and to provide interactive visualization. The server runs an efficient isosurface extraction algorithm that generates view-dependent portions of the isosurface. The resulting 3D primitives are organized into groups and sent to the client to be rendered. Our approach uses primitive compression, progressive level-of-detail, and primitive caching techniques to improve the interactivity perceived by the user. This paper reports and compares the experiment results under different settings to show the effectiveness of these techniques. Applied together, they reduce both the amount of data transferred and time spent when the result becomes 90% correct by two orders of magnitude.