Accelerating virtual walkthrough with visual culling techniques

Virtual walkthrough application allows users to navigate and immerse in the generated 3D environment with computer graphics assist. The 3D environment requires a large amount of geometry to make it look realistic. When the number of geometry increase, the performance of the application will become slower. Consequently, it creates a conflict between the needs of realistic and real time. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of visual culling techniques such as view frustum culling, back face culling and occlusion culling in the virtual walkthrough application. We render only what we can see during the application runtime and cull away unnecessary geometry. This will accelerate the performance of the system. Without the culling techniques implemented in virtual reality application such as virtual walkthrough, the system has to allocate a large space of memory to store the geometry data. We have tested these techniques to the Ancient Malacca data. With the visual culling techniques implemented, the virtual walkthrough system can work in real time mode without scarifying realism factor.