a novel page-based data structure for interactive walkthroughs
Given a data layout of a large walkthrough scene, we present a novel and simple spatial hierarchy on the disk-pages of the layout that has notable advantages over a conventional spatial hierarchy on the scene geometry. Assume that each disk-page consists of a set of triangles whose bounding boxes are computed. A spatial hierarchy of the walkthrough space is constructed, not with the given scene, but with the bounding boxes of disk-pages. The leaf nodes of the spatial-hierarchy refer directly to the page numbers of the pages of the bounding box it contains. We call this hierarchy on the pages as the disk-page hierarchy. We also propose a self-contained disk-page format that would suit this data structure well. Further, we present a new cache-oblivious graph-based data layout algorithm called the 2-factor layout that would preserve the proximity and orientation properties of the primitives in the layout. Walkthrough experiments have been conducted on a city scene consisting of over 110M triangles. Our system renders this scene on a laptop within a one pixel projection error at over 20 fps with simple texture substitution based simplification of distant objects, and with no explicit data/cache management.
data layouts walkthrough systems spatial data structures out-of-core algorithms