ADAPTIVITY OF 3D WEB CONTENT IN WEB-BASED VIRTUAL MUSEUMS A QUALITY OF SERVICE AND QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE PERSPECTIVE Hussein Bakri A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2019 Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18453 This item is protected by original copyright Adaptivity of 3D Web Content in Web-Based Virtual Museums A Quality of Service and Quality of Experience Perspective Hussein Bakri This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the University of St Andrews December 2018 Abstract The 3D Web emerged as an agglomeration of technologies that brought the third dimension to the World Wide Web. Its forms spanned from being systems with limited 3D capabilities to complete and complex Web-Based Virtual Worlds. The advent of the 3D Web provided great opportunities to museums by giving them an innovative medium to disseminate collections’ information and associated interpretations in the form of digital artefacts, and virtual reconstructions thus leading to a new revolutionary way in cultural heritage curation, preservation and dissemination thereby reaching a wider audience. This audience consumes 3D Web material on a myriad of devices (mobile devices, tablets and personal computers) and network regimes (WiFi, 4G, 3G, etc.). Choreographing and presenting 3D Web components across all these heterogeneous platforms and network regimes present a significant challenge yet to overcome. The challenge is to achieve a good user Quality of Experience (QoE) across all these platforms. This means that different levels of fidelity of media may be appropriate. Therefore, servers hosting those media types need to adapt to the capabilities of a wide range of networks and devices. To achieve this, the research contributes the design and implementation of Hannibal, an adaptive QoS & QoE-aware engine that allows Web-Based Virtual Museums to deliver the best possible user experience across those platforms. In order to ensure effective adaptivity of 3D content, this research furthers the understanding of the 3D web in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) through empirical investigations studying how 3D Web components perform and what are their bottlenecks and in terms of QoE studying the subjective perception of fidelity of 3D Digital Heritage artefacts. Results of these experiments lead to the design and implementation of Hannibal. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Prof Aaron Quigley for being a lovely and supportive supervisor. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Head of School of Computer Science, Prof Simon Dobson for all his support. In similar vein, I would like to thank Mr Alex Bain, the school manager for his support. I also want to thank from every cell of my heart, the lovely mentors and angels: Ms Janie Brooks, Ms Lisa Dow, Ms Mary Carr and Ms Anne Campbell. I am also indebted for the guidance and encouragement that I have received from a beautiful soul Dr Juliana Bowles. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Alice Toniolo for her feedback and comments that helped hone chapter 6. I would like also to express my thanks to the Open Virtual Worlds group for providing me with 3D digitised models and environments for the experiments conducted in this thesis. I would like to express my thanks to all friends, colleagues and staff members of the school of Computer Science just to mention few names: Dr Ishbel Duncan, Dr Oche Ojembi, Ms Sarah Kennedy, Dr Elizabeth Rhodes, Dr Adeola Fabola, Dr Iain Oliver, and Dr Amjad Al Tobi. A big thank you goes to Prof Iain Gent and Dr Tom Kelsey for their feedback on the mock Viva. I am grateful to my family, whom have provided me enormous emotional support all my life and encouraged me to finish up the undertaking of a PhD. Finally, I would like to mention Dr Colin Allison and Dr Alan Miller who contributed greatly to my knowledge. Funding A very special gratitude goes out to my funder the University of St Andrews for their financial support of this research through the St Leonard Scholarship and thanks also goes to the School of Computer Science for funding all the conferences trips and registrations. Candidate's declaration I, Hussein Bakri, do hereby certify that this thesis, submitted for the degree of PhD, which is approximately 64,445 words in length, has been written by me, and that it is the record of work carried out by me, or principally by myself in collaboration with others as acknowledged, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. I was admitted as a research student at the University of St Andrews in September 2014. I, Hussein Bakri, received assistance in the writing of this thesis in respect of grammar and spelling, which was provided by Ms Janie Brooks. I received funding from an organisation or institution and have acknowledged the funder(s) in the full text of my thesis. Date Signature of candidate Supervisor's declaration I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of PhD in the University of St Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree. Date Signature of supervisor Permission for publication In submitting this thesis to the University of St Andrews we understand that we are giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the University Library for the time being in force, subject to any copyright vested in the work not being affected thereby. We also understand, unless exempt by an award of an embargo as requested below, that the title and the abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker, that this thesis will be electronically accessible for personal or research use and that the library has the right to migrate this thesis into new electronic forms as required to ensure continued access to the thesis. I, Hussein Bakri, confirm that my thesis does not contain any third-party material that requires copyright clearance. The following is an agreed request by candidate and supervisor regarding the publication of this thesis: Printed copy No embargo on print copy. Electronic copy No embargo on electronic copy. Date Signature of candidate Date Signature of supervisor Underpinning Research Data or Digital Outputs Candidate's declaration I, Hussein Bakri, understand that by declaring that I have original research data or digital outputs, I should make every effort in meeting the University's and research funders' requirements on the deposit and sharing of research data or research digital outputs. Date Signature of candidate Permission for publication of underpinning research data or digital outputs We understand that for any original research data or digital outputs which are deposited, we are giving permission for them to be made available for use in accordance with the requirements of the University and research funders, for the time being in force. We also understand that the title and the description will be published, and that the underpinning research data or digital outputs will be electronically accessible for use in accordance with the license specified at the point of deposit, unless exempt by award of an embargo as requested below. The following is an agreed request by candidate and supervisor regarding the publication of underpinning research data or digital outputs: No embargo on underpinning research data or digital outputs. Date Signature of candidate Date Signature of supervisor I dedicate my work to any hope of removing hypocrisy from academia... Publications A large proportion of this work has been published in peer-reviewed publications of which I am the main author and contributor: • Chapter 2: Bakri, H., Allison C., Miller A., Oliver I. (2016) Virtual Worlds and the 3D Web - Time for Convergence?. In: Immersive Learning Research Network. iLRN 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 621. Springer, Cham [32]. • Chapter 3 & 4: Bakri, H., and Allison, C. "Measuring QoS in web-based virtual worlds: an evaluation of unity 3D web builds." Pro- ceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments. ACM, 2016. [30]. • Chapter 5 & 7: Bakri, H., Miller A., Oliver I. (2018) Fidelity Perception of 3D Models on the Web. In: Beck D. et al. (eds) Immer- sive Learning Research Network. iLRN 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 840. Springer, Cham [28]. I authored and contributed material to the following tangential works: • Bakri, H., Allison, C., Miller, A., & Oliver, I. (2015). HTTP/2 and QUIC for Virtual Worlds and the 3D Web?. Procedia Computer Science, 56, 242-251. [31]. • Allison, C. and Bakri, H., 2015, October. How the Web was Won: Keeping the computer networking curriculum current with HTTP/2. In Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2015. 32614 2015. IEEE (pp. 1-9). IEEE [15]. Note on Web Resources Due to the relatively new concepts discussed in this corpus of work, some resources are only available on the World Wide Web. All URIs were verified at the time of the submission of this thesis. However, due to the nature of such resources their longevity cannot be guaranteed. Such references have only been used where citations to more traditional peer-reviewed published material were not possible. Contents Contents i List of Figures vi List of Tables ix Listings xi Abbreviations xiii Glossary xvii I Motivation and Overview 1 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Overview .