Enhancing digital documents by including 3D-models

Due to their simplicity, triangle meshes are used to represent geometric ob jects in many applications. Since the number of triangles often goes beyond the capabilities of computer graphics hardware and the transmission time o f such data is often inappropriately high, a large variety of mesh simplifi cation algorithms has been proposed in the last years. In this paper we ide ntify major requirements for the practical usability of general purpose mes h reduction algorithms to enable the integration of triangle meshes into di gital documents. The driving idea is to understand mesh reduction algorithm s as a software extension to make more complex meshes accessible with limit ed hardware resources (regarding both transmission and display). We show ho w these requirements can be efficiently satisfied and discuss implementatio n aspects in detail. We present a mesh decimation scheme that fulfills thes e design goals and which has already been evaluated by several users from d ifferent application areas. We apply this algorithm to typical mesh data se ts to demonstrate its performance. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right s reserved.