CONTACT: arbitrary in-between motions for collision detection

A new approach to the collision detection problem was introduced previously by the authors (2000), that allows one to detect collisions continuously and efficiently between polyhedral primitives (vertices, edges and faces). This paper extends the previous results to continuously detect collisions between pairs of complex polyhedral objects. A C++ library, CONTACT, is developed. The tests of this library reported show that this approach is especially suited for a precise real-time interaction in virtual environments.