We have presented a simple and very efficient method for detecting collisions between a general polygonal model and one or several cylindrical tools. Due to its impressive performances, the method is directly applicable in the context of a real time surgery simulator.
Since no pre-computation is required, our methods ideally fits to dynamic scenes where objects move and deform over time. As a comparison, the reference code RAPID, that is particularly fast, is five times slower assumed that pre-computations are already done, which is not possible for deformable bodies. Our method could thus be useful in many other applications, such as interactive sculpturing where the user manipulates a rigid tool for editing a 3D deformable shape.
The approach could also be generalized to be applied in more general collision configurations: here, one of the colliding objects has a simple geometry. In the general case with complicated shapes, our approach could be used to quickly test the collision between an objet and a non axis-parallel bounding box (or even a bounding dodecahedron) surrounding another object. If the second object is embedded into a hierarchy of bounding boxes, this idea could lead to an acceleration of the general Obb tree method. Lastly, since one of the objects can be a mere soup of polygons changing over time, the method could be applied to the real-time collision detection between any deformable object (from an elastic surface or volume to a liquid substance) and rigid obstacles embedded into pre-computed hierarchies of bounding volumes.
Moreover, our method is extremely easy to implement (only few dozen lines of codes in an application using OpenGLfor visualization), portable (OpenGLexists on most platforms) and benefits from different graphics hardware as constructors generally offer an optimized implementation of OpenGL.