Virtual Worlds for Mega Models

Reconciling scene realism with interactivity has emerged as one of the
most important areas in making virtual reality feasible for large-scale
datasets consisting of several millions of primitives.
This talk surveys our research for achieving interactivity without 
sacrificing realism in virtual reality walkthroughs and flythroughs of 
polygonal CAD datasets. 

I shall outline our work on genus-reducing 
simplifications as well as real-time view-dependent simplifications 
that allow on-the-fly selection amongst multiple levels of detail, based 
upon lighting and viewing parameters. Our method allows multiple levels 
of detail to coexist on the same object at different regions and to 
merge seamlessly without any cracks or shading artifacts. 

As the complexity of CAD datasets continues to increase beyond the display
complexity, image-based rendering is beginning to emerge as a viable
alternative to conventional rendering. This talk will also 
present an overview of our work on hardware-assisted image-based 
rendering that allows interactive exploration of computer-generated 
scenes.