Researchers in Offenburg, Germany, say they've devised an information and communication architecture with optics technology that's based on outsourcing to servers all the heavy number crunching required for computer animations and virtual reality simulations. After churning through such data, the servers then provide the information either as stream or vector-based data displayable as 3-D on mobile devices.

Dan Curticapean and 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 optimize and send the virtual reality data to the mobile phone or other mobile device."

The researchers will present their findings next week in Rochester, N.Y., during the annual joint meetings of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society's Division of Laser Science.