Evaluation of techniques for web 3D graphics animation on portable devices

Providing Internet users with good 3D representations used to be a hard task, not only for web graphic designers but also for web programmers. However, the rapid evolution of SmartPhones has drastically changed the industry. In this paper we attempt to evaluate server and client-side rendering procedures for web 3D animation delivery. Using Ajax and WebSockets, we have developed two discrete instances of a server-side rendering system. We have also implemented an X3Dom equivalent scenario that utilizes X3D and HTML5/WebGL technologies, to emulate client-side rendering on the same environment. The three implementations are evaluated in terms of battery and memory consumption, latency in graphics display and required network resources.