Methods and data structures for virtual world exploration

This paper is dedicated to virtual world exploration techniques that help humans to understand a 3D scene. The paper presents a technique to calculate the quality of a viewpoint for a scene, and describes how this information can be used. A two-step method for an automatic real-time scene exploration is introduced. In the first step, a minimal set of “good” points of view is determined; in the second step, these viewpoints are used to compute a camera path around the scene. The proposed method enables one to get a good comprehension of a single virtual artifact or of the scene structure.