Navigating in a 3D networked virtual environment with a six-degree of freedom on a mobile device can be disorientating and challenging to users. In this technical demonstration, we show how 3D bookmarks can be used to simplify such interactions. Our system integrates the 3D bookmarks into a DASH-based network virtual environment in a DASH-compliant manner and is available on both the desktop and mobile.

We demonstrate the use of DASH, a widely-deployed standard for streaming video content, for streaming 3D content in an NVE (Networked Virtual Environment) consisting of 3D geometry and associated textures. We have developed a DASH client for NVE to show how NVE benefits from the advantages of DASH: it offers a scalable, easy-to-deploy 3D streaming framework. In our system, the 3D content is first statically partitioned into compliant DASH data, and metadata is provided in order for the client to manage which data to download. Based on a proposed utility metric for geometry and texture at the different resolution, the client can choose the content to request depending on its viewpoint. We effectively provide a Web-based client to navigate through our sample 3D scene, while deriving the streaming requests from its computation of the necessary online parameters, in a receiver-driven manner.

DASH is now a widely deployed standard for streaming video content due to its simplicity, scalability, and ease of deployment. In this paper, we explore the use of DASH for a different type of media content -- networked virtual environment (NVE), with different properties and requirements. We organize a polygon soup with textures into a structure that is compatible with DASH MPD (Media Presentation Description), with a minimal set of view-independent metadata for the client to make intelligent decisions about what data to download at which resolution. We also present a DASH-based NVE client that uses a view-dependent and network dependent utility metric to decide what to download, based only on the information in the MPD file. We show that DASH can be used on NVE for 3D content streaming. Our work opens up the possibility of using DASH for highly interactive applications, beyond its current use in video streaming.

A 3D bookmark in a networked virtual environment (NVE) provides a navigation aid, allowing the user to move quickly from its current viewpoint to a bookmarked viewpoint by simply clicking on the bookmark. In this paper, we first validate the positive impact that 3D bookmarks have in easing navigation in a 3D scene. Then, we show that, in the context of a NVE that streams content on demand from server to client, navigating with bookmarks leads to lower rendering quality at the bookmarked viewpoint, due to lower locality of data. We then investigate into how prefetching the 3D data at the bookmarks and precomputation of visible faces at the bookmarks help to improve the rendering quality.