Modeling of and navigation in complex 3D documents

During the past years, increasing computing power has opened the door to 3D scene complexities that were unimaginable a decade ago. But this quantitat ive leap reveals a new class of problems: software architectures for small- or mid-scale models typically do not scale and consequently fail to be app ropriate for large-scale modeling and visualization. While there is signifi cant progress in visualizing large models locally using libraries like Open GL Optimizer or the Fahrenheit project, these libraries are still relativel y low-level in terms of their geometric primitives. Our belief is that a tr ue leap in scene complexity can only be achieved with much more compact and abstract model descriptions. Visualizing models at a detail resulting in t riangle numbers that are-when accurately tesselated-four or five orders of magnitude greater than those that can be visualised interactively with curr ent high-end graphics hardware, demands completely new approaches for the h andling, of complex scenes, thereby, opening the research fields of languag e-based modeling and efficient model evaluation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.