Smooth levels of detail

Levels of detail (LODs) are used in interactive computer graphics to avoid overload of the rendering hardware with too many polygons. While conventional methods use a small set of discrete LODs, we introduce a new class of polygonal simplification: Smooth LODs. A very large number of small details encoded in a data stream allows a progressive refinement of the object from a very coarse approximation to the original high quality representation. Advantages of the new approach include progressive transmission and encoding suitable for networked applications, interactive selection of any desired quality, and compression of the data by incremental and redundancy free encoding.