![](bg6.png)
can be loaded much faster, and even in parallel, as we
can exploit the browser’s capability to download sev-
eral patches of the mesh at a time. In contrast to other
web-based formats like X3D, the data can directly be
transferred “as is” to the GPU, without any further
CPU-based processing inside the client’s JavaScript
layer. While our vertex data format is more compact
than previous ones, the client’s GPU memory must
still be able to hold all data that is currently rendered.
Otherwise, constant paging of data packages totally
breaks performance. Luckily, for typical large mod-
els like this car, it mostly makes no sense to display
all its components simultaneously: e.g. one will ei-
ther display the car’s body or the interior of the motor
compartment, but never both at the same time.
The identification of one out of up to 64K ob-
jects during picking is made possible through our im-
proved single-pass picking buffer algorithm, provid-
ing 16 bits of precision for picked vertex attributes.
All proposed model processing, rendering, and inter-
action methods have been integrated into the open-
source framework X3DOM (Behr et al., 2010; Behr
et al., 2012) and the publicly available Mixed Reality
framework instantReality (FhG, 2012).
6 CONCLUSIONS
Within this paper, we have discussed some important
aspects of our approach towards fast and precise vi-
sualization of – and interaction with – 3D model data
inside a Web Browser. Our methods are straightfor-
ward to implement, easy to use, and enable visual-
izations of various kinds of input data, ranging from
scientific visualization to highly complex CAD mod-
els.
For the future, we would like to investigate the
possibility of using a progressive loading mechanism
that does not introduce too much CPU processing
overhead on the client side. This could lead to a sig-
nificantly improved user experience. Visualizing ex-
tremely large models with many millions of polygons
also requires more sophisticated techniques for out-
of-core rendering. The integration of such methods
into browser-based visualizations, especially on mo-
bile devices, is thus another interesting challenge.
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