A distributed architecture for searching, retrieving and visualizing complex 3D models on Personal Digital Assistants

Mobile devices are significantly changing the human-computer interaction. In particular, the ubiquitous access to remote resources is one of the most interesting characteristics achievable by using mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants, cellular phones and tablets. This paper presents an architecture that allows users to search and visualize complex 3D models over Personal Digital Assistants. A peer-to-peer network of brokers manages queries for searching objects among several data providers. The object selected for visualization is forwarded to a specialized graphics provider; this provider allows the users to investigate the object remotely rendering the scene and sending back to the Personal Digital Assistant the computed image. The user can interactively analyse objects that would not be otherwise visualizable locally on the Personal Digital Assistant.