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Enabling real-time physics simulation in future interactive entertainment

Published: 30 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Interactive entertainment has long been one of the driving factors behind architectural innovation, pushing the boundaries of computing to achieve ever more realistic virtual experiences. Future entertainment applications will feature robust physics modeling to enable on-the-fly content creation. However, application designers must provide at least 30 graphical frames per second to provide the illusion of visual continuity. This constraint directly impacts the physics engine, which must deliver the results of physical interactions in the virtual world at a fraction of this frame rate. With more sophisticated applications combining massive numbers of complex entities, the cost of robust physics simulation will easily exceed the capability of today's most power machines.This work explores the characteristics of real-time physics simulation, and proposes a suite of future-thinking benchmarks stressing different situations that represent the demands of future interactive entertainment. With this suite, we then explore techniques to help meet these demands, including parallel execution, a fast estimation approach that self-regulates error, and a value prediction technique that is allowed to get "close enough" to the real value. We demonstrate that parallel execution together with the proposed fast estimation approach can satisfy the demands of nearly all of the PhysicsBench suite.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        Sandbox '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Videogames
        July 2006
        178 pages
        ISBN:1595933867
        DOI:10.1145/1183316
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 30 July 2006

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        Author Tags

        1. benchmark
        2. error tolerance
        3. interactive entertainment
        4. parallel execution
        5. real-time physics

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        SANDBOX06
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        SANDBOX06: An ACM Video Game Symposium 2006
        July 30 - 31, 2006
        Massachusetts, Boston

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        • (2021)Surveying Reality (SurReal): Software to Simulate Surveying in Virtual RealityISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi1005029610:5(296)Online publication date: 4-May-2021
        • (2017)Large Viscoelastic Fluid Simulation on GPU2017 16th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames)10.1109/SBGames.2017.00023(134-143)Online publication date: Nov-2017
        • (2016)Work stealing for interactive services to meet target latencyACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3016078.285115151:8(1-13)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
        • (2016)Work stealing for interactive services to meet target latencyProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/2851141.2851151(1-13)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
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        • (2012)Accelerating physics in large, continuous virtual environmentsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.184924:2(125-134)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2012
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