Collision Handling and its Applications

Abstract

In contrast to real-world scenarios, object representations in virtual environments have no notion of interpenetration. Therefore, algorithms for the detection of interfering object representations are an essential component in virtual environments. Applications are wide-spread and can be found in areas such as surgery simulation, games, cloth simulation, and virtual prototyping. Early collision detection approaches have been presented in robotics and computational geometry more than twenty years ago. Nevertheless, collision detection is still a very active research topic in computer graphics. This ongoing interest is constantly documented by new results presented in journals and at major conferences, such as Siggraph and Eurographics. In order to enable a realistic behavior of interacting objects in dynamic simulations, collision detection algorithms have to be accompanied by collision response schemes.