A Context-Aware Adaptive Rendering System for User-Centric Pervasive Computing Environments

In user-centric pervasive computing environments where users can utilize nearby heterogeneous devices anytime and anywhere, context-aware remote rendering is essential. It is impractical not only to manually copy 3D content from one device to another whenever a user moves, but also to render complex 3D data locally on resource-limited devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. In this paper, we propose a context-aware adaptive rendering system which visualizes 3D content with customized user interfaces dynamically adapting to current device contexts such as processing power, memory size, display size, and network condition at runtime, while preserving the interactive performance of the 3D content. To increase the responsiveness of remote 3D rendering, we use a mechanism which temporally adjusts the quality of visualization, adapting to the current device context. By adapting the quality of visualization in terms of image quality, the overall responsiveness and frame-rate are maintained no matter the resource status. In order to overcome inevitable physical limitations of display capabilities and input controls on client devices, we provide a user interface adaptation mechanism which dynamically binds operations provided by the 3D application and user interfaces with pre-described device and application profiles. We prototyped our adaptive rendering system and experimented with a specific scenario in user-centric pervasive environments.