Dynamic data structures for realtime management of large geometric scenes

We present a data structure problem which describes the requirements of a simple variant of fully dynamic walk-through animation: We assume the scene to consist of unit size balls in R2 or higher dimensions. The scene may be arbitrarily large and has to be stored in secondary memory (discs) with relatively slow access. We allow a visitor to walk in the scene, and a modeler to update the scene by insertions and deletions of balls. We focus on the realtime requirement of animation systems: For some t (specified by the computation power of (the rendering hardware of) the graphic workstation) the data structure has to guarantee that the balls within distance t of the current visitor's position are presented to the rendering hardware, 20 times per second. Insertions and deletions should also be available to the visitor with small delay, independent of the size of the scene. We present a data structure that fulfills the above task in realtime. Its runtime is output-sensitive, i.e. linear in a quantity close to the output size of the query. We further present (preliminary) experimental results indicating that our structure is efficient in practice.