The Scalability of X3D4 PointProperties: Benchmarks on WWW Performance

With the development of remote sensing devices, it becomes more and more convenient for individual researchers to acquire high-resolution point cloud data by themselves. There have been plenty of online tools for researchers to exhibit their work. However, the drawback of existing tools is that they are not flexible enough for the users to create 3D scenes of a mixture of point-based and triangle-based models. X3DOM is a WebGL-based library built on Extensible 3D (X3D) standard, which enables users to create 3D scenes with only a little computer graphics knowledge. Before X3D 4.0 Specification, little attention has been paid to point cloud rendering in X3DOM. PointProperties, an appearance node newly added in X3D 4.0, provides point size attenuation and texture-color mixing effects to point geometries. In this work, we propose an X3DOM implementation of PointProperties. This implementation fulfills not only the features specified in X3D 4.0 documentation, but other shading effects comparable to the effects of triangle-based geometries in X3DOM, as well as other state-of-the-art point cloud visualization tools. We also evaluate the performances of some of these effects. The result shows that a general laptop is able to handle most of the examined conditions in real-time.