Data Management for Visualizing Large Virtual Environments

Effective data management is crucial for interactive multimedia applications due to the large amount of data that need to be processed on-line. When the size of a 3D virtual world is larger than the available physical memory of a display client, we need to proactively maintain useful data in the memory for immediate or future graphics rendering. Traditional page-based data management scheme becomes insufficient for applications with strong spatial and temporal coherence. In this paper we describe a 3D navigation system for visualizing large virtual environments. In the system we propose novel data management techniques based on discrete visibility precomputation, hybrid cache model, and prioritized spatial prefetching. Our preliminary experimental results show that these techniques can improve response time and navigation smoothness.