Interactive display and visualization of large geometric and textured models is becoming a fundamental capability. There are numerous application areas, including games, movies, CAD, virtual prototyping, and scientific visualization. One of observations about geometric models used in interactive applications is that their model complexity continues to increase because of fundamental advances in 3D modeling, simulation, and data capture technologies. As computing power increases, users take advantage of the algorithmic advances and generate even more complex models and data sets. Therefore, there are many cases where we are required to visualize massive models that consist of hundreds of millions of triangles and, even, billions of triangles. However, interactive visualization and handling of such massive models still remains a challenge in computer graphics and visualization. In this monograph we discuss various techniques that enable interactive visualization of massive models. These techniques include visibility computation, simplification, levels-of-detail, and cache-coherent data management.We believe that the combinations of these techniques can make it possible to interactively visualize massive models in commodity hardware. Table of Contents: Introduction / Visibility / Simplification and Levels of Detail / Alternative Representations / Cache-Coherent Data Management / Conclusions / Bibliography
About the Author: Sung-Eui Yoon is currently an assistant professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Seoul National University in 1999 and 2001 respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research interests include visualization, interactive rendering, geometric problems, and cache-coherent algorithms and layouts. Enrico Gobbetti is the director of the Advanced Computing and Communications Program and of the Visual Computing group at the CRS4 research center in Italy. He holds an Engineering degree (1989) and a Ph.D. degree (1993) in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to joining CRS4, he held research and teaching positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the NASA Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences. At CRS4, Enrico developed and managed a research program supported through industrial and government grants. His research spans many areas of computer graphics and is widely published in major journals and conferences. He regularly serves as program committee member or reviewer for international conferences and journals and is currently Associate Editor of Computer Graphics Forum. Technologies developed by his group have found practical use in as diverse real-world applications as internet geoviewing, scientific data analysis, and surgical training. Dave Kasik, Boeing Senior Technical Fellow, is responsible for visualization and interactive tech[1]niques across the enterprise. His research interests include innovative combinations of basic 3D graphics and user interface technologies and increasing awareness of the impact of visualization technology inside and outside Boeing. Dave has a BA in Quantitative Studies from the Johns Hop[1]kins University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a member of IEEE, ACM SIGGRAPH, and ACM SIGCHI. He is a member of the editorial board for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Dinesh Manocha is currently a Phi Delta Theta/Mason Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley 1992. He received Junior Faculty Award in 1992, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and NSF Career Award in 1995, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1996, Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997, and Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievements at UNC Chapel Hill in 1998. He has also received eight best paper & panel awards at top conferences in graphics, modeling, simulation and visualization. He has been working on technologies for displaying massive models for more than 10 years. Many of the technologies developed by his group on collison detection, GPU-based algorithms and large model rendering have been widely used. He has published more than 210 papers in leading conferences and journals on computer graphics, geometric modeling, robotics, virtual environments and computational geometry. He has also served as a program committee member for more than 50 leading conferences in these areas and also served in the editorial board of many journals.