Visual Navigation of Large Environments Using Textured Clusters

A visual navigation system is described which uses texture mapped primitives to represent clusters of objects to maintain high and approximately constant frame rates. In cases where there are more unoccluded primitives inside the viewing frustum than can be drawn in real-time on the workstation, this system ensures that each visible object, or a cluster that includes it, is drawn in each frame. The systemalso supports the use of traditional level-of-detail" representations for individual objects, and supports the automatic generation of a certain type of level-of-detail for objects and clusters of objects. The system supports the concept of choosing a representation from among those associated with an object that accounts for the direction from which the object is viewed. The system as a whole can be viewed as a generalization of the level-of-detail concept, where the entire scene is stored as a hierarchy of levels-of-detail that is traversed top-down to nda good representation f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SI3D
• Authors: Paulo W. C. Maciel, Peter Shirley
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Constant Frame Rates, SI3D 1995, Texture Mapped Primitives, Traditional Level-of-detail