Deformable object simulation in virtual environment

Abstract

We implement deformable virtual object simulations on modern graphics hardware. The deformable objects are modeled using mass spring method. With a large set of mass nodes and springs, the real-time simulations are able to be accomplished using the computational power of GPU. Traditionally, this kind of virtual simulation is difficult to achieve interactive frame rates if simply using CPU processing. Nevertheless, the programmable graphics hardware is unable to communicate between vertices or pixels; neither can it write to constant memory. Therefore, the information required for simulation is encapsulated into several textures. Simulated results are sent to frame buffer after the fragment program terminated. With aid of the Frame Buffer Object, we are able to access content in frame buffer directly as texture. Comparing the simulation throughput of the one using CPU with the other one using GPU, we are pleased with the performance increase through simulating deformable virtual object with mass spring model on modern graphics hardware.