This paper presents a streaming technique for synthetic texture intensive 3D animation sequences. There is a short latency time while downloading the animation, until an initial fraction of the compressed data is read by the client. As the animation is played, the remainder of the data is streamed online seamlessly to the client. The technique exploits frame-to-frame coherence for transmitting geometric and texture streams. Instead of using the original textures of the model, the texture stream consists of view-dependent textures which are generated by rendering offline nearby views. These textures have a strong temporal coherency and can thus be well compressed. As a consequence, the bandwidth of the stream of the view-dependent textures is narrow enough to be transmitted together with the geometry stream over a low bandwidth network. These two streams maintain a small online cache of geometry and view-dependent textures from which the client renders the walk-through sequence in real-time. The overall data transmitted over the network is an order of magnitude smaller than an MPEG post-rendered sequence with an equivalent image quality.
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