CAREER: Improvement, Simplification, and Clustering in Polygonal Datasets for Virtual Reality Applications

正在进行的研究的目标是设计一套技术和工具，允许在统一框架内改进、简化和聚集多边形数据集。这是朝着制定技术以实现复杂虚拟环境的交互可视化这一长期目标迈出的重要的第一步。用来解决上述问题的技术都是基于“滚动弹丸”的概念，由a壳的概念形式化。为了改善现有的具有裂缝和丢失的小多边形的数据集，直观的想法是滚动一个球体来填充这些小洞。这些缺陷在当今的数据集中很常见，目前还没有一种通用的技术来统一处理它们。多边形对象的简化将通过简化对象的亏格来实现。这为创建保持拓扑的多分辨率层次结构的现有技术提供了自然扩展，并与之垂直。正在进行的研究将删除小于用户指定大小的拓扑特征。多边形数据集的聚类在设计有效的方法来解决合成环境的交互漫游的全局光照和可见性预处理方面有相当大的用处。这项研究将通过使用足够大的滚动球体来完成对数据集中的多边形的聚类。正在进行的教育活动的目标是通过将虚拟现实展示为工程、科学和医学中严肃任务的有用工具来扩展当前以娱乐为导向的观点。这些活动包括通过幻灯片和视频演示以及虚拟环境的科学应用实践演示，试图接触到高中生、本科生和整个社区。这些活动还包括创建和开发一门新的关于虚拟环境的研究生级课程。为该项目的研究部分开发的工具和技术将用于传授实践教育，以培养在虚拟环境中以应用为导向的研究和开发工作的感觉。

The objective of the research being done if to devise a set of techniques and tools that will allow improvement, simplification, and clustering of polygonal datasets within a unified framework. This is an important first step towards the long-term objective of formulating techniques to enable interactive visualization of complex virtual environments. The techniques being used to solve the above problems are al based on the notion of `rolling a sphere`, formalized by the concept of a-hulls. For improving the existing polygonal datasets that have cracks and small missing polygons the intuitive idea is to roll a sphere that will fill-up these minor holes.Such flaws are common in present-day datasets and no general techniques are currently known that will handle them in a unified manner. Simplification of polygonal objects will be achieved through simplifying the genus of the objects. This provides a natural extension to, and is orthogonal to, the existing techniques for creating topology-preserving multiresolution hierarchies. The research being done will remove topological features that are less than a user-specificable size. Clustering of polygonal datasets is of considerable use in devising efficient methods for solving global illumination and visibility preprocessing for interactive walkthroughs of synthetic environments. This research will accomplish clustering of polygons in a dataset by using sufficiently large rolling spheres. The goal of the educational activities being done is to expand the current entertainment-oriented view of virtual reality by presenting it as a useful tool for serious tasks in engineering, science, and medicine. The activities include attempts to reach out to the high-school students, undergraduates, and the community at large through slide-and-video shows and hands-on demonstrations of the scientific applications of virtual environments. The activities also include the creation and development of a new graduate-level course on virtual environments. The tools and techniques developed for the research component of this project will be used to impart a hands-on education to inculcate a feel for application-oriented research and development work in virtual environments.