VR Physics And Collision Detection In Hardware?

Alea asks: "Currently, a big chunk of the graphics pipeline, transform and lighting (T&L), is beginning to show up in graphics hardware. It seems likely that some other capabilities, such as collision detection, will follow. This means the main processor can be used to compute more sophisticated physics models for games and VR systems. However, it seems to me that many physical model computations could also be performed in hardware, freeing the processor for more sophisticated AI and conceptual modeling. Does anyone know if there is any work being done on implementing collision detection and simple physical models (e.g. momentum, gravity, friction) in hardware?"

Comments

Don't know, but here is another idea

[Pilchie]

Why not do some of the Collision detection or physics models in an FPGA to offload it from the main processor? (Assuming you have control over the VR controller of course), then when (if) they do become available in hardware, you just have to modify your driver. This also lets you model some more interesting things that might not ever be in hardware (like aerodynamics, etc).
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Re:What's the point?

[Pilchie]

I disagree, although I don't think that the equations involved in simple physics models are complex enough to be a major factor, collision detection is. Since most graphics systems already calculate a bounding volume for each object, why not have them also detect if those bounding volumes intersect, and do something if they do? This could be done in hardware and fits in nicely with what most graphics pipelines do anyway.
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~