| Abstract | Reconciling scene realism with interactivity has emerged asone of the most important areas in making virtual reality fea-
sible for large-scale mechanical CAD datasets consisting of sev-
eral millions of primitives. This paper surveys our research and
related work for achieving interactivity without sacrificing real-
ism in virtual reality walkthroughs and flythroughs of polygonal
CAD datasets. We outline our recent work on efficient genera-
tion of triangle strips from polygonal models that takes advan-
tage of compression of connectivity information. This results
in substantial savings in rendering, transmission, and storage.
We outline our work on genus-reducing simplifications as well
as real-time view-dependent simplifications that allow on-the-fly
selection amongst multiple levels of detail, based upon lighting
and viewing parameters. Our method allows multiple levels of
detail to coexist on the same object at different regions and to
merge seamlessly without any cracks or shading artifacts. We
also present an overview of our work on hardware-assisted image-
based rendering that allows interactive exploration of computer-
generated scenes.
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