Rapid Cloth Collision Detection using Bounding Sphere Trees

The accurate detection of object-to-object collisions has numerous practical applications in the fields of computer simulation and graphics. However, naive collision detection and handling is a very costly process that increases exponentially with the size and complexity of the scene geometry, making it impractical for moderate to large-scale simulations. This paper presents a method for efficiently handling collision detection in semi-rigid mass-spring particle systems such as cloth. In particular, this paper will outline the usage and implementation of a bounding sphere tree as a spatial accelerator, as well as other optimizations that can exploit this hierarchical structure.