Patent ID: 7538764

Claim:
A method of preparing data for displaying a surface of an n-dimensional body; n being at least 3, the method comprising the steps of: obtaining, in an electronic device, an n-dimensional discrete mesh representation of the surface wherein obtaining a discrete mesh representation of the surface comprises obtaining a grid description of the n-dimensional body, the grid being defined by intersection points of n sets of reference surfaces, and at least part of said intersection points, lying within said body, being associated with connectivity information, the mesh representation of the surface comprising a plurality of boundary nodes, each boundary node lying on or adjacent to the surface, each boundary node being associated with connectivity information comprising representations of up to (n−1) incoming and/or up to (n−1) outgoing directions towards up to 2*(n−1) adjacent boundary nodes adjacent to the said boundary node, the directions being defined in such a way that the cross product of the up to n−1 incoming or outgoing directions associated with any boundary node represents a further vector which points away from the surface at that boundary node; generating a polygonal representation of the surface of the object from the plurality of boundary nodes and the connectivity information of those boundary nodes.