Navigating static environments using image-space simplification and morphing

We present a z-buffered image-space-based rendering technique that allows navigation in complex static environments. The rendering speed is relatively insensitive to the complexity of the scene as the rendering is performed a priori, and the scene is converted into a bounded complexity representation in the image space. Real-time performance is attained by using hardware texture mapping to implement the imagespace warping and hardware fine transformations to compute the viewpoint-dependent warping function. Our pro posed method correctly simulates the kinetic depth effect (parallax), occlusion, and can resolve the missing visibility information by combining z-bufTered environment maps from multiple viewpoints.