Abstract: Real-time streaming of shape deformations in a shared distributed virtual environment is a challenging task due to the difficulty of transmitting large amounts of 3D animation data to multiple receiving parties at a high frame rate. In this paper, we present a framework for streaming 3D shape deformations, which allows shapes with multi-resolutions to share the same deformations simultaneously in real time. The geometry and motion of deforming mesh or point-sampled surfaces are compactly encoded, transmitted, and reconstructed using the spectra of the manifold harmonics. A receiver-based multi-resolution surface reconstruction approach is introduced, which allows deforming shapes to switch smoothly between continuous multi-resolutions. On the basis of this dynamic reconstruction scheme, a frame rate control algorithm is further proposed to achieve rendering at interactive rates. We also demonstrate an efficient interpolation-based strategy to reduce computing of deformation. The experiments conducted on both mesh and point-sampled surfaces show that our approach achieves efficient performance even if deformations of complex 3D surfaces are streamed. Copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.