Abstract Within this paper, we present a novel, straightforward progressive encoding scheme for general triangle soups, which is particularly well‐suited for mobile and Web‐based environments due to its minimal requirements on the client's hardware and software. Our rapid encoding method uses a hierarchy of quantization to effectively reorder the original primitive data into several nested levels of detail. The resulting stateless buffer can progressively be transferred as‐is to the GPU, where clustering is efficiently performed in parallel during rendering. We combine our approach with a crack‐free mesh partitioning scheme to obtain a straightforward method for fast streaming and basic view‐dependent LOD control.

We describe an approach to integrate multiple rendering back-ends under a common application layer for distributed systems. The primary goal was to find a practical and non-intrusive way to use potentially very different rendering back-ends in heterogeneous computing environments without impairing their strengths and without burdening the back-ends or the application with details of the cluster environment. Our approach is based on a mediator layer that can be plugged into the OpenSG infrastructure. This design allows us to elegantly extent OpenSG's low-level multithreading and clustering capabilities to our system. It also allows us to sync incremental changes very efficiently. We demonstrate results and problems with two case studies.

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). The computation of points on the surface is local, which results in an out-of-core technique that can handle any point set. We show that the approximation error is bounded and present tools to increase or decrease the density of the points, thus allowing an adjustment of the spacing among the points to control the error. To display the point set surface, we introduce a novel point rendering technique. The idea is to evaluate the local maps according to the image resolution. This results in high quality shading effects and smooth silhouettes at interactive frame rates.

Are Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) well suited for entertaining and educating a lay audience? In this paper we try to find an answer to this question and work out the conditions and requirements for successful installations. We will describe our "test bed", the Cybernarium Days 2002, the world's first public exhibition exclusively dedicated to Virtual and Augmented Reality, which attracted more than 10.000 visitors in 6 days. We also present the results of the user questioning, which took place during the exhibition, and the "lessons learnt". Furthermore we focus on software aspects, which enabled us to use low cost hardware and offered a way to build new exhibits in a short time. Since the raise or fall of a VR/AR installation is mainly influenced by its user interface, we present a classification scheme for devices and outline their advantages and disadvantages, offering other VR/AR-developers a guideline for their work on public VR/AR-exhibits.

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). We present tools to increase or decrease the density of the points, thus, allowing an adjustment of the spacing among the points to control the fidelity of the representation. To display the point set surface, we introduce a novel point rendering technique. The idea is to evaluate the local maps according to the image resolution. This results in high quality shading effects and smooth silhouettes at interactive frame rates.