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

正在进行的研究的目标，如果设计一套技术和工具，将允许改进，简化，并在一个统一的框架内的多边形数据集的聚类。 这是实现制定技术以实现复杂虚拟环境的交互式可视化的长期目标的重要的第一步。 用于解决上述问题的技术都是基于“滚动球体”的概念，由a-hulls的概念形式化。 为了改善现有的多边形数据集，有裂缝和小的缺失多边形的直观的想法是滚动一个球体，将填补这些小洞。这样的缺陷是常见的，在当今的数据集，目前还没有通用的技术，将处理它们在一个统一的方式。 多边形对象的简化将通过简化对象的亏格来实现。 这提供了一个自然的扩展，是正交的，现有的技术，用于创建拓扑保持多分辨率层次结构。 正在进行的研究将删除小于用户指定尺寸的拓扑特征。 多边形数据集的聚类在设计用于解决合成环境的交互式漫游的全局照明和可见性预处理的有效方法中是相当有用的。 本研究将使用足够大的滚动球体来完成数据集中多边形的聚类。 正在进行的教育活动的目标是通过将其作为工程，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虚拟现实观点。 这些活动包括试图通过幻灯片和视频展示以及虚拟环境科学应用的实际演示来接触高中生、大学生和整个社区。 这些活动还包括创建和开发关于虚拟环境的新的研究生课程。 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，以灌输在虚拟环境中进行面向应用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.