A cache approach towards web-based interactive large-scale terrain rendering

We propose a novel method for web-based rendering of highly detailed 3D terrains. The proposed method relies on the server to provide rendering results directly for the clients. In order to achieve an interactive frame rate at the client and to reduce the workload of the server, a client side cache system is designed to reconstruct in-between screen shots from previous rendering results sparsely provided by the server, which are in the form of color images and depth maps (to be referred to as Terrain Instance Map, or TIM, in the paper). The cache system is designed to reuse TIMs as much as possible based on a series of view point analysis, screen coverage checking and effective resolution calculation on both CPU and GPU. The characteristics of our method include: quick full-detail view, high quality screen shots throughout the session, highly scalable, and it has little requirement on the rendering algorithm or data structure used at the server, safety for terrain data. Experiment results show that the proposed method is effective. © 2012 Binary Information Press.