GigaWalk: Interactive Walkthrough of Complex Environments

Abstract

We present a new parallel algorithm and a system, GigaWalk, for interactive walkthrough of complex, gigabytesized environments. Our approach combines occlusion culling and levels-of-detail and uses two graphics pipelines with one or more processors. GigaWalk uses a unified scene graph representation for multiple acceleration techniques, and performs spatial clustering of geometry, conservative occlusion culling, and load-balancing between graphics pipelines and processors. GigaWalk has been used to render CAD environments composed of tens of millions of polygons at interactive rates on systems consisting of two graphics pipelines. Overall, our system s combination of levels-of-detail and occlusion culling techniques results in significant improvements in frame-rate over view-frustum culling or either single technique alone.