Welcome to Multimedia Lab's HTML5 virtual texturing demo. This demo shows how a HTML5 compatible browser can show spectacular graphics by offloading computationally expensive tasks to your computer's graphics card using WebGL.

The dataset you are looking at was captured from a real Island named "Antelope Island". It is located in Utah, USA. The dataset is 122880 x 122880 pixels, that's about 14 gigapixels of image data. If the data was not compressed it would be around 56 gigabytes. Even using compression the data set is still around 2 gigabytes. Since waiting while your browser downloads two gigabytes is not all that fun, we use a technique called "Virtual Texturing" that downloads only the portions of the data which are really visible on screen. This way you can start browsing right away, without having to wait for gigabytes of data to finish downloading.

Untill recently, virtual texturing technology was only available in high-end game engine's such as id software's Rage and DICE's Battlefield 3. However, thanks to modern browser technologies, this can now be achieved in javascript without relying on any special plug-ins. If you want more information on the technology used in this demo the following two publications may be of interest to you:

• C.-F. Hollemeersch, B. Pieters, A. Demeulemeester, P. Lambert, R. Van de Walle. Real-Time Visualizations of Gigapixel Texture Data Sets Using HTML5. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 7131:621-623. January 2012.
• C.-F. Hollemeersch, B. Pieters, P. Lambert, R. Van de Walle. Real-Time Visualizations of Gigapixel Texture Data Sets Using HTML5. In Gpu Pro: Advanced Rendering Techniques. Pages 623-641. June 2010.

You can also view our MMM2012 poster.

For questions/problems regarding this demo please contact:
charlesfrederik.hollemeersch[at]ugent.be.