Highly detailed geometric models are rapidly becoming commonplace in computer graphics. These models, often represented as complex triangle meshes, challenge rendering performance, transmission bandwidth, and storage capacities. This paper introduces the progressive mesh (PM) representation, a new scheme for storing and transmitting arbitrary triangle meshes. This efficient, lossless, continuous-resolution representation addresses several practical problems in graphics: smooth geomorphing of level-of-detail approximations, progressive transmission, mesh compression, and selective refinement. In addition, we present a new mesh simplification procedure for constructing a PM representation from an arbitrary mesh. The goal of this optimization procedure is to preserve not just the geometry of the original mesh, but more importantly its overall appearance as defined by its discrete and scalar appearance attributes such as material identifiers, color values, normals, and texture coordinates. We demonstrate construction of the PM representation and its applications using several practical models.

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Almost as long as there have been user interfaces, there have been special software systems and tools to help design and implement the user interface software. Many of these tools have demonstrated significant productivity gains for programmers, and have become important commercial products. Others have proven less successful at supporting the kinds of user interfaces people want to build. This article discusses the different kinds of user interface software tools, and investigates why some approaches have worked and others have not. Many examples of commercial and research systems are included. Finally, current research directions and open issues in the field are discussed.

The Visualization Toolkit (vtk) is a freely available C++ class library for 3D graphics and visualization. In this paper we describe core characteristics of the toolkit. This includes a description of object-oriented models for graphics and visualization; methods for synchronizing system execution; a summary of data representation schemes; the role of C++; issues in portability across PC and Unix systems; and how we automatically wrap the C++ class library with interpreted languages such as Java and Tcl. We also demonstrate the capabilities of the system for scalar, vector, tensor, and other visualization

this paper, we show how texture mapping hardware can produce near-real-time texture motion,

We present an algorithm that accelerates the extraction of iso-surfaces from unstructured grids by avoiding the traversal of the entire set of cells in the volume. The algorithm consists of a sweep algorithm and a data decomposition scheme. The sweep algorithm incrementally locates intersected elements, and the data decomposition scheme restricts the algorithm's worstcase performance. For data sets consisting of hundreds of thousands of elements, our algorithm can reduce the cell traversal time more than 90% over the naive isosurface extraction algorithm, thus facilitating interactive probing of scalar fields for large-scale problems on unstructured three-dimensional grids. 1 Introduction Displaying iso-surfaces is an effective way to visualize three-dimensional scalar fields. Used to represent regions where the physical field is constant, isosurfaces allow visualization with a full range of visual depth. By visualizing the spatial distributions of several iso-surfaces, scientists ar...

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is rapidly becoming the standard file format for transmitting 3D virtual worlds across the Internet. Static and dynamic descriptions of 3D objects, multimedia content, and a variety of hyperlinks can be represented in VRML files. Both VRML browsers and authoring tools for the creation of VRML files are widely available for several different platforms. In this paper we describe the topologically-assisted geometric compression technology included in our proposal for the VRML Compressed Binary Format. This technology produces significant reduction of file sizes and, subsequently, of the time required for transmission of such files across the Internet. Compression ratios of up to 50:1 or more are achieved for large models. The proposal also includes combines a binary encoding to create compact, rapidly-parsable binary VRML files. The proposal is currently being evaluated by the Compressed Binary Format Working Group of the VRML Consortium as a ...

Research in robotic grasping has flourished in the last 25 years. A recent survey by Bicchi [1] covered over 140 papers, and many more than that have been published. Stemming from our desire to implement some of the work in grasp analysis for particular hand designs, we created an interactive grasping simulator that can import a wide variety of hand and object models and can evaluate the grasps formed by these hands. This system, dubbed “GraspIt!,” has since expanded in scope to the point where we feel it could serve as a useful tool for other researchers in the field. To that end, we are making the system publicly available (GraspIt! is available for download for a variety of platforms from

We present a novel approach to controlling a virtual 3D camera with a 2D mouse or stylus input device that is based on gestural interaction. Our approach to 3D camera manipulation, UniCam, requires only a single-button stylus or mouse to directly invoke specific camera operations within a single 3D view. No 2D widgets or keyboard modifiers are necessary. By gesturally invoking all camera functionality, UniCam reduces the modal nature of typical desktop 3D graphics applications, since remaining mouse or stylus buttons can be used for other application functionality. In addition, the particular choice and refinement of UniCam controls efficiently enables a wide range of camera manipulation tasks, including translation in three-dimensions, orbiting about a point, animated focusing on an object surface, animated navigation around an object, zooming in upon a region, and saving and restoring viewpoints. UniCam's efficiency derives primarily from improved transitions between techniques and t...

We present a system, ArtNova, for 3D model design with a haptic interface. ArtNova offers the novel capability of interactively applying textures onto 3D surfaces directly by brush strokes, with the orientation of the texture determined by the stroke. Building upon the framework of inTouch [GEL00], it further provides an intuitive physically-based force response when deforming a model. This system also uses a user-centric viewing technique that seamlessly integrates the haptic and visual presentation, by taking into account the user's haptic manipulation in dynamically determining the new viewpoint locations. Our algorithm permits automatic placement of the user viewpoint to navigate about the object. ArtNova has been tested by several users and they were able to start modeling and painting with just a few minutes of training. Preliminary user feedback indicates promising potential for 3D texture painting and modeling.