Implementation and Evaluation of 3D Graphics Compression for Optimizing the Quality of User Experience in Networked Virtual Reality

A thesis on the implementation of a 3D Graphics Compression interface between an already available compression algorithm developed in C++ and Unity. The objective of this work is to design a method to provide better quality of user experience for VR simulation through the utilization of a decoder in Unity to execute at runtime and decompress data while downloading it from a remote server, saving resources from the user’s terminal and lowering the complexity of the terminal’s computations. Lastly, an evaluation between the state-of-the-art solutions for treating compressed data in Unity and this new method is performed to verify the consistency of the improvement. The thesis explores the key passages needed to create the final model, among them the choice of the right communication protocol for an optimized data transmission, the choice of the most suitable inter-process communication method for data exchange between C++ and C#, the implementation of concurrent programming and the choice of compliant 3D objects to provide a coherent simulation. The final simulation consists of a user-friendly environment (visit to a museum), navigable either via HMD or Desktop VR (WoW), in which heavily dense 3D meshes are progressively retrieved and rendered as they are downloaded from a remote server. By analyzing the statistics related to the delay of each LOD retrieval the results show that the proposed solution brings an optimization in terms of efficiency in the tangibility of the scene, also providing excellent outcomes on environments with limited network availability.