Enhancing sense of reality by efficient and precise collision detection in virtual environments

Abstract

As the foundation of user-system interaction in virtual environments, collision detection is a time-consuming process and few real-time interactive algorithms for general objects developed. Most of the existing methods aim for reducing the computation time for some special cases. Collision detection algorithms developed are either not fast enough for practical applications or restricted to a class of specific model. In fact, a general analysis of the performance of collision detection algorithms is extremely difficult because performance is situation specific. The motivation of this work is to satisfy the real-time interaction and high precision requirements of a Virtual Environment (VE) for applications such as virtual design, virtual assembly, virtual training for manufacturing operations and maintenance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.