As already indicated in [2,5], an important application for multiresolution models is progressive transmission. Transmission of the whole model might take minutes or even hours for a large mesh using a low-bandwidth network. Therefore a method is required to successively transmit the surface geometry starting with a coarse simplification. The PM approach supports progressive transmission in a quite natural way because the data is already stored as a coarse base mesh and a sequence of detail records. Transmitting the whole object while getting an early impression of its appearance is easily and efficiently done by transmitting the PM representation.
In the view-dependent framework the client only requests a small part of the object stored at the server. In this implementation a simple approach was chosen where the client requests any information not yet received. Alternatively the client could send its viewing parameters to the server, which can then determine the data needed by the client without further communication. However, the latter method has disadvantages during rapid movement.