Preloading and precedence lists for smooth playback of 3D character animation on the Internet

3D character animation, as it applies to telling entertaining stories, requires a large amount data, but the need for the data is temporal, meaning it can be progressively loaded. The Internet transmission bottleneck may cause hesitation and pausing while that data is being transmitted, which lowers the perceived quality and possibly interrupts the story narrative. In this paper, we remove the hesitations by determining a \´\´preload time\´\´ and transmitting the "important" data first heuristically, using "precedence lists".