Dynamic Polygon Visibility Ordering for Head-Slaved Viewing in Virtual Environments

This paper presents an approach to visibility called the Viewpoint Movement Space (VpMS) algorithm which supports the concept of dynamic polygon visibility orderings for head-slaved viewing in virtual environments (VE). The central idea of the approach is that the visibility, in terms of back-to-front polygon visibility ordering, does not change dramatically as the viewpoint moves. Moreover, it is possible to construct a partition of the space into cells, where for each cell the ordering is invariant. As the viewpoint moves across a cell boundary typically only a small and predictable change is made to the visibility ordering. The cost to perform this operation represents a notable reduction when compared with the cost of resolving the visibility information from the BSP tree where the classification of the viewpoint with every node plane has to be performed. The paper demonstrates how the subdivision into such cells can represent the basic source for an acceleration of the rendering process. We also discuss how the same supportive data structure can be exploited to solve other tasks in the graphics pipeline.