Washington: If texting, talking, e-mailing and snapping pictures on cell phones leaves you craving for more, you can now access or even display 3-D virtual reality simulations and animations on your device.

By merging communication architecture with optics, researchers have created a new approach based on outsourcing to servers all the heavy number crunching required by computer animations and virtual reality simulations.

After churning through it, the servers then provide the information either as stream (avi, motion JPEG) or as vector-based data (VRML, X3D) displayable as 3-D on mobile devices. Dan Curticapean and his colleagues Andreas Christ and Markus Feisst of Offenburg's University of Applied Science devised the approach.

"Since the processing power of mobile phones, smart phones and personal digital assistants is increasing - along with expansion in transmission bandwidth - it occurred to us that it is possible to harness this power to create 3-D virtual reality," said Curticapean. "So we designed a system to optimise and send the virtual reality data to the mobile phone or other mobile device."

Their approach works like this: Virtual reality data sent by the server to a mobile phone can be visualised on the phone's screen, or on external display devices, such as a stereoscopic two-video projector system or a head-mounted stereoscopic display, according to a release of Optical Society of America.

The displays are connected to the mobile phone by wireless Bluetooth so the user's mobility is preserved. In order to generate stereoscopic views on the mobile display screens, a variety of means can be used, such as a built-in 3-D screen or using lenticular lenses (as in human vision) or anaglyph images viewed with special glasses having lenses of two different colours to create the illusion of depth.

The upshot of this new approach is improved realistic 3-D presentation, enhanced user ability to visualise and interact with 3-D objects and easier presentation of complex 3-D objects.

These findings will be presented Oct 23 at Rochester Riverside Convention Centre.