A Survey of Advanced Interactive 3-D Graphics Techniques

Interactive 3-D Graphics are a new emerging field enabled by powerful and cost-effective computer systems. The goal is to present a three-dimensional image of a scene stored in a computer to give a human user the impression that he or she is looking at a virtual world. In producing such an illusion, we would like to always be able to produce images that match or exceed the limits of human visual perception in all aspects. Unfortunately, limitations in the performance of the image generators we employ for this task defeat this goal. The ever-increasing demands of applications make it unlikely that this situation will ever change significantly. Working solutions require us to trade off image fidelity for graphical complexity and performance of the application. In doing so, it is vital to understand those human factors that dominate the perception of interactive 3-D computer graphics [Helm93].