Tools for Virtual Reality Visualization of Highly Detailed Meshes

The number of polygons in meshes acquired using 3D scanning or by computational methods for shape generation is rapidly increasing. With this growing complexity of geometric models, new visualization modalities need to be explored for more effortless and intuitive inspection and analysis. Virtual reality (VR) is a step in this direction but comes at the cost of a tighter performance budget.

In this paper, we explore different starting points for achieving high performance when visualizing large meshes in virtual reality. We explore two rendering pipelines and mesh optimization algorithms and find that a mesh shading pipeline shows great promise when compared to a normal vertex shading pipeline.We also test the VR performance of commonly used visualization tools (ParaView and Unity) and ray tracing running on the graphics processing unit (GPU).

Finally, we find that mesh pre-processing is important to performance and that the specific type of pre-processing needed depends intricately on the choice of rendering pipeline.