The objective of the research being done if to devise a set of techniques and tools that will allow improvement, simplification, and clustering of polygonal datasets within a unified framework. This is an important first step towards the long-term objective of formulating techniques to enable interactive visualization of complex virtual environments. The techniques being used to solve the above problems are al based on the notion of `rolling a sphere`, formalized by the concept of a-hulls. For improving the existing polygonal datasets that have cracks and small missing polygons the intuitive idea is to roll a sphere that will fill-up these minor holes.Such flaws are common in present-day datasets and no general techniques are currently known that will handle them in a unified manner. Simplification of polygonal objects will be achieved through simplifying the genus of the objects. This provides a natural extension to, and is orthogonal to, the existing techniques for creating topology-preserving multiresolution hierarchies. The research being done will remove topological features that are less than a user-specificable size. Clustering of polygonal datasets is of considerable use in devising efficient methods for solving global illumination and visibility preprocessing for interactive walkthroughs of synthetic environments. This research will accomplish clustering of polygons in a dataset by using sufficiently large rolling spheres. The goal of the educational activities being done is to expand the current entertainment-oriented view of virtual reality by presenting it as a useful tool for serious tasks in engineering, science, and medicine. The activities include attempts to reach out to the high-school students, undergraduates, and the community at large through slide-and-video shows and hands-on demonstrations of the scientific applications of virtual environments. The activities also include the creation and development of a new graduate-level course on virtual environments. The tools and techniques developed for the research component of this project will be used to impart a hands-on education to inculcate a feel for application-oriented research and development work in virtual environments.
