Database Support for Haptic Exploration in Very Large Virtual Environments

The efficient management of complex objects has become an enabling technology for modern multimedia information systems as well as for many novel database applications. Unfortunately, the integration of modern database systems into human centered virtual reality applications including multimodal simulations fails to achieve the indispensably required interactive response times. In this paper, we present an approach which achieves efficient query processing along with industrial-strength database support for real time haptic rendering systems which compute force feedback (haptic display). Our approach externalizes and accelerates the approved main-memory Voxmap-PointShellTM (VPS) approach. We group numerous independent database queries together according to a cost model which takes statistical information reflecting the actual data distribution into account. The performance of our approach is experimentally evaluated using a realistic data-set CAR, provided by our industrial partner, a German car manufacturer. Our results show that we can achieve satisfying rendering frame rates using the presented access techniques.