CAD data visualization on mobile devices using sequential constrained Delaunay triangulation

3D graphic rendering in mobile application programs is becoming increasingly popular with rapid advances in mobile device technology. Current 3D graphic rendering engines for mobile devices do not provide triangulation capabilities for surfaces; therefore, mobile 3D graphic applications have been dealing only with pre-tessellated geometric data. Since triangulation is comparatively expensive in terms of computation, real-time tessellation cannot be easily implemented on mobile devices with limited resources. No research has yet been reported on real-time triangulation on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a real-time triangulation algorithm for visualization on mobile devices based on sequential constrained Delaunay triangulation. We apply a compact data structure and a sequential triangulation process for visualization of CAD data on mobile devices. In order to achieve a high performance and compact implementation of the triangulation, the nature of the CAD data is fully considered in the Computational process. This paper also presents a prototype implementation for a mobile 3D CAD viewer running on a handheld Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.