Volume-Surface Collision Detection

Abstract

The presence or not of collisions between objects is usually required to study the interaction between them, increasing the realism in virtual environments. Collision detection between polygonal objects has been widely studied, and more recently some studies have been made concerning collisions between volume objects. Collision detection between volume datasets and polygonal objects is introduced in this work. This kind of mixed scenes appears naturally in many applications such as surgery simulation and volume edition. To detect the collision, first the volume dataset is represented by a single 3D texture. Then, a mapping from eye space to volume space is established, such as each mesh fragment has a 3D texture coordinate. The collision is verified by fragment during the rasterization stage. We use OpenGL R occlusion query extension to count the number of mesh fragments colliding with the volume. Our tests show that up to 3800 pairs of volume-mesh may be evaluated in one second.