Distributed virtual environments allow users at di erent geographical locations to share and interact within a common virtual environment via a local network or through the Internet. To deliver a good performance for such applications, we need to address several issues in di erent research disciplines. First, we must be able to model virtual objects e ectively. The recently developed multi-resolution techniques for object modeling are of great value here, since they are capable of simplifying the object models and therefore reducing the time to render them. This may greatly reduce the demand for rendering performance on the client machines. Second, with the constraint of the limited bandwidth of the Internet, we need to reduce the response time by reducing the amount of data requested over the network. Caching of suitable object models of high a nity will reduce the amount of data requested over the network for a faster response time. Prefetching object models by predicting those whic...
Jimmy H. P. Chim, Rynson W. H. Lau, Antonio Si, Ho