Viper: A Quasi-Real-Time Virtual-Environment Application
Richard L. Holloway · 2010
When creating a virtual-environment (VE) application, there is often a conflict between the complexity of the virtual environment and the update rate of the system. Typically, more complex environments are more useful and interesting, but may require more rendering work than the graphics system can perform at interactive rates. The viper application gives improved performance in a VE visualization application by allowing the user to trade off image quality for interactive performance. The user can specify a given update rate and viper will attempt to match that rate by simplifying the scene. The user can specify that he wants a full-complexity image (with a correspondingly slower update rate) at any time. 1. Introduction Virtual-environments systems often use head-mounted displays (HMDs) in order to either immerse the user in a virtual world or superimpose virtual objects into the real environment. In both cases, the system needs to respond almost instantaneously to user movements, o...