Interactive 3D graphics for consumer applications

The use of real-time computer generated 3D images has traditionally been confined to high cost applications such as professional CAD and flight simulation. The computational demands have required special purpose hardware or a high degree of parallelism, beyond the reach of low cost systems such as personal or home computers. In the future, however, the continuing trend of VLSI technology will make practical the inclusion of realistic real-time 3D graphics in systems at the consumer product level. This may be seen as a continuation the development of low cost 2D graphic displays over the last decade. The initial monochrome text only displays have been replaced by bit-mapped displays with increasingly large colour ranges and resolutions. The ability to generate 3D images of a database in real-time brings a number of benefits. The user has control not only of his or her viewpoint of the modelled world but is also able to interact with it, and modify the data base with instant feedback of his or her actions. This contrasts with existing systems such as video disks where the only control the user has is over the sequence of playback of sets of stored images. Related to this is a data compression advantage since the 3D model database will typically require much less storage space than a sequence of colour pictures