REAL-TIME COLLISION DETECTION

Today's sophisticated 3D games, virtual reality applications, and physical simulators involve rich graphical environments of millions of polygons. In these worlds, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of detailed animated objects may be interacting not only with these complex environments but also amongst themselves. With a typical update rate of 60 frames per second, a minimal amount of time is available for determining the intersection status of all objects in the world at a given time in order to maintain a believable simulation. Real-Time Collision Detection is a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the data structures and algorithms that make this possible. Taking a practical approach, the book discusses all the important components of an efficient real-time collision detection system. Topics covered include object representations, intersection tests, and distance queries, and the mathematics behind them: hierarchical and spatial partitioning methods, numerical and geometrical robustness issues, hardware acceleration methods, and advanced optimization for modern computer architectures. This book extends and broadens the discussion of collision detection in 'Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environments.'