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. Realtime performance is attained by using hardware texture mapping to implement the image-space warping and hardware affine transformations to compute the viewpoint–dependent warping function. Our proposed method correctly simulates the kinetic depth effect (parallax), occlusion, and can resolve the missing visibility information by combining z-buffered environment maps from multiple viewpoints. CR