Multi Patch 3D Terrain Representation for Collaborative Terrain Editor

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we propose a method to represent a new method to represent large-scale 3D terrain efficiently to be used in a client-server collaborative terrain editor. The objective is to design a terrain representation that allows changes to be distributed between connected clients without throttling the bandwidth. The method divides the terrain into smaller patches so it can be streamed partially to connected clients. Moreover, we also reduce the data representation by using 8-bit values and modify the terrain representation to decrease the inaccuracy caused by data reduction. We present a thorough description of the proposed method and a demonstration of the technique in a practical collaborative 3D terrain editor application. We performed several tests with different terrain specifications and measured the interactivity level of the application. Based on these tests, we can conclude that the proposed method is capable of reducing the time-to-interactive of the application and consequently increasing the interactivity level of the system.