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Section: Overall Objectives
Introduction
Mobility is the major (r)evolution for current interactive systems. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges for interactive 3D graphics is now to evolve to a mobile context. The main goal of the IPARLA project is to contribute to this evolution.
During the last decade, a large range of consumer electronics devices have been developed, that allow the user to benefit from computing resources in mobile settings. The last generations of cell phones, personal digital assistants, or even portable game devices, combine embedded programmable CPUs (and more recently GPUs) with several flavors of wireless communication capabilities. Such Mobile and Connected Devices (MCDs) offer the opportunity to develop a wide variety of end-user software applications over client/server infrastructures.
MCDs induce specific constraints for the incoming data flow (e.g. limited CPU/GPU for real-time computing and small screens) as well as for outgoing data flow (e.g. limited input devices). These technological constraints naturally decrease the cognitive immersion of the user, which affects the performance and the adhesion to the end-user applications. In the IPARLA project, we want to address this issue by jointly developing techno-centered and human-centered techniques for interactive mobile 3D applications.
Although MCDs are an important part of our project, we focus more on the mobility of the user and the involved applications (including the data) than on the device itself. In other words, we do not aim exclusively on the development of applications for MCD, but rather to design flexible solutions that allow easy conversions for the user and the applications between a mobile context and a fixed context. For example, we want to design concepts that enable us to use the same application on a MCD, on a standard PC or in a virtual reality center as illustrated by Figure 1 .
In order to reach this goal, our development is strongly oriented to produce scalable, multi-resolution solutions that are able to stream and deal with large amounts of data in a client-server context. These five keywords recall the main approaches we have selected to reach our objectives.
