View-dependent culling of dynamic systems in virtual environments

Scalable rendering of virtual environments requires culling objects that have no effect on the view. This paper explores culling moving objects by not solving the equations of motion of objects that don't affect the view. While this approach could be scalable for many kinds of environments, it raises two problems: consistency - ensuring that objects that come back into view do so in the right state - and completeness - ensuring that objects that would have entered the view volume as a result of their motions, do so. Solutions to these problems lie in studying the statistics of the motion of objects. We show strategies for addressing the problem of consistency, with a number of examples that illustrate both the difficulties involved in, and the potential gains to be obtained by, formulating a comprehensive approach.