Subject: Re: Collision Detection
From: "Dimitri Holman" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 07:19:19 -0800

3/26/96            9:48 AM

>Is that why so many of the DIS runs I've seen feature "flying" and "bur-
>rowing" tanks?  Real-time 3D surface interaction isn't very robust.

I guess you've been seeing all the wrong demos. Yes, DIS ( distrubuted
interactive simulation ) exercises have had notoriously bad "flying tanks" and
"ground hog" vehicles. Remember though, in MOST DIS exercises the Simulator or
the "SAF" is separate from the visualization. Also, the many different
versions of terrain databases covering the same "playing ground" have
different levels of fidelity. ERGO flying entities.. Even if you do you're
collision detection at the simulator level different databases will result in
the same effect. We do collision detection at the visualization level so
regardless of who's putting out the PDU's our vehicles are on the ground. The
same could be said of 3D apps like LightWave. They "know" the database and it
is common to the app. As such collision detection should be "ROBUST".

dimitri holman
visualization engineer
science applications international corp