Oct 13, 2008
If mere texting, talking, e-mailing and snapping pictures on mobile devices aren’t enough to satisfy your data cravings, now there’s the prospect of accessing and displaying 3-D virtual reality simulations and animations on them. New information architecture from researchers in Offenburg, Germany puts 3-D visualizations in the palm of your hand to make this possible.
By devising a novel information and communication architecture with optics technology, researchers created a new approach based on outsourcing to servers all the heavy number crunching required by computer animations and virtual reality simulations. After churning through it, the servers then provide the information either as stream (avi, motion JPEG) or as vector-based data (VRML, X3D) displayable as 3-D on mobile devices. Dan Curticapean and his colleagues Andreas Christ and Markus Feisst of Offenburg’s University of Applied Science devised the approach.
Since the processing power of mobile phones, smart phones and personal digital assistants is increasing—along with expansion in transmission bandwidth—it occurred to us that it is possible to harness this power to create 3-D virtual reality,” says Curticapean. “So we designed a system to optimize and send the virtual reality data to the mobile phone or other mobile device.”
