DELUGE: Decomposed Entropy-coded Live Unstructured Geometry Exchange for Real-time Particle Streaming
Abstract: Particle-based physics simulations, including fluids, smoke, and granular media, are fundamental to visual realism in immersive VR and AR. With the growing adoption of social VR and digital twins, demand is increasing for shared experiences in which multiple users interact with the same simulation in real time. Realizing such experiences requires low-latency streaming of large-scale particle data from a server to each client, yet existing point cloud compression methods such as G-PCC (TMC13) and Draco assume static geometric structures; when applied to dynamic particle streaming, their encoding latency exceeds the frame period, failing to meet real-time delivery requirements. We propose DELUGE, a streaming compression architecture that exploits the temporal coherence and velocity predictability inherent in physics simulation particles, achieving sub-frame-latency encoding and decoding through three complementary techniques. Evaluation on dynamic point cloud datasets demonstrates that DELUGE achieves approximately $20\times$ faster decoding than G-PCC (TMC13) and $6\times$ faster encoding than Draco. We further build end-to-end client implementations for both web browsers and Apple Vision Pro, and confirm through a within-participants perceptual quality evaluation and a two-person collaborative task study on Vision Pro that the proposed method supports real-time collaborative experiences with hand-tracked fluid interaction.