Case study on real-time visualization of virtual Tubingen on commodity PC hardware

For psychophysical studies in spatial cognition a virtual model of the picturesque old town of Tubingen has been constructed. In order to perform psychophysical experiments in highly realistic virtual environments the model is based on high quality texture maps adding up to several hundreds of MBytes. To accomplish the required real-time frame updates, view frustum and occlusion culling without visibility pre-processing, levels of detail, and texture compression are applied in an interleaved manner. Shared memory communication and a standard PC with two commodity graphics cards is used to enable the powerful combination of those techniques because this combination is not yet available on a single graphics card.