A Flexible and Extensible Architecture for Visibility Culling

Abstract

In this paper, we present an on-going work on the development of a generic visualization framework for 3D networked virtual environments, suitable for deployment on a variety of platforms and easily adaptable for a whole range of applications and scenarios. The proposed framework exhibits several important high-level characteristics, the main ones being flexibility and extensibility. The former is evidenced by the ability to perform rapid switching between a number of underlying visibility determination techniques, while the latter is demonstrated by the fact that new techniques can easily be integrated through a plug-in system. On a technical level, the software design allows for run-time integration of additional visibility processors and efficient selection mechanisms, based on user-defined parameters. The inclusion of a specific entity in the software architecture (dubbed the mediator), responsible for the communication between several visibility processors for various environments, eliminates the need for these processors to be aware of one another. At the same time, the software design allows for run-time integration of additional processors. The spatial database and the visibility algorithms are separated in their respective modules, in order to make the framework more maintainable and reusable.