Interactive Exploration of Gigantic Point Clouds on Mobile Devices

Abstract

New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D applications feasible on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture and its implementation for mobile exploration of large point clouds, which are nowadays ubiquitous in the cultural heritage domain thanks to the increased performance and availability of 3D scanning techniques. The quality and performance of our approach is demonstrated on gigantic point clouds, interactively explored on Apple iPad and iPhone devices using in variety of network settings. Applications of the technology include on-site exploration during scanning campaigns and promotion of cultural heritage artifacts.