A few 3D interactive modeling systems have been developed recently. Such systems must cope with a high flow of input measurements during the entire acquisition period. Therefore, the reconstruction and rendering algorithms used must all run online. However, compression algorithms are still run offline as postprocessing. In order to develop a fully interactive modeling framework, this paper presents an online compression algorithm where the system automatically adjusts the level of detail according to the user behavior. The proposed method can reduce peak memory consumption by more than 50% during the acquisition of a typical model and the final result is comparable to offline compression. Furthermore, the results obtained show that a local acquisition approach must be prioritized.