THE CONE OF VISION - A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR INTERACTIVE VOLUMETRIC DISPLAY

A new technique is proposed for interactive exploration of very large (out-of-core) 3-dimensional time-varying data sets, The idea is to pro cess only the part of the data which is actually seen by the observer' s eye, i.e., the cone of vision (COV). This technique involves a ''rea l-time'' data clipping algorithm to compute the data lying inside the COV with a negligible overhead, Using the COV approach, the time requi red to render a scene becomes independent of the size of the data set, As only the data lying inside the COV are to be in the main memory of the computer, we introduce a new data structure and a new memory mana gement technique so that arbitrarily large-sized time-evolving data se ts may be explored, Actual measures (scalar data set from direct numer ical simulation of turbulence at resolution 256(3)) of the global effi ciency are given. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.