Navigating large terrains using commodity mobile devices

We describe a hybrid client–server technique for remote adaptive streaming and rendering of large terrains in resource-limited mobile devices. The technique has been designed to achieve an interactive rendering performance on a mobile device connected to a low-bandwidth wireless network. The rendering workload is split between the client and the server. The terrain area close to the viewer is rendered in real-time by the client. The terrain located far from the viewer is portrayed as view-dependent impostors, rendered by the server on demand. A prototype has been built and an exhaustive set of experiments covering several platforms, wireless networks and a wide range of viewer velocities has been conducted. Results show that the approach is feasible, effective and robust.