Dedicated graphics hardware and advanced software techniques make it possible to render complex virtual environments in real time. Yet, virtual spaces must also be dynamic in order to provide a truly compelling experience. My work on simulation culling and level-of-detail is targetted at reducing the cost of dynamic computations in large or complex virtual environments. For instance, one aim is to develop technology to realistically simulate a city on the scale of New York on commodity hardware.
My work on this area falls into two main areas. The first deals with isolated systems that do not move over large distances, such as amusement park rides. Two projects resulted from this work: the fun park project and the DMC (Dynamics Modeling and Culling) project.
Taking a different view of the problem, I have also proposed proxy simulations as a way of replacing expensive out-of-view dynamics with a cheaper to compute model.
I have given two survey presentations on simulation level-of-detail and culling:
Stephen Chenney, Okan Arikan and D.A.Forsyth, "Proxy Simulations For Efficient Dynamics", Proceedings of Eurographics 2001, Short Presentations, 2001.
Okan Arikan, Stephen Chenney and D.A.Forsyth, "Efficient Multi-Agent Path Planning", Proceedings of the 2001 Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation, 2001, pp 151-162.
Stephen Chenney, Jeffrey Ichnowski and D.A.Forsyth, "Dynamics Modeling and Culling," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, March/April 1999, pages 79-87.
Stephen Chenney, Jeffrey Ichnowski and D.A.Forsyth, "Efficient Dynamics Modeling for VRML and Java", In Proceedings of the 1998 Symposium on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML98), pages 15-24, 1998.
Stephen Chenney and D.A.Forsyth, "View Dependent Culling of Dynamic Systems in Virtual Environments". In Proceedings of the 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pages 55-58, 1997.
Jessica Hodgins and Deborah Carlson worked with hopping robots in Simulation Level-of-Detail.
David O'Brien, Susan Fisher and Ming Lin developed a technique for reducing the cost of particle systems in Simulation Level of Detail for Automatic Simplification of Particle System Dynamics.