There are many aspects to efficient real-time rendering of interesting scenes. Of interest to us today is adapting the resolution of a mesh so that we don’t use more polygons than necessary to paint the pixels that it covers. It turns out that the work we’ve already covered on simplification and progressive meshes provides a very convenient way of addressing this problem.
Iterative edge contraction induces a hierarchical structure on triangulated surfaces. This paper shows how to use this structure to extract view-dependent approximations of mesh geometry.
There’s actually a whole book on this topic: Level of Detail for 3D Graphics. You can find out about it at http://www.lodbook.com/.
There’s also an entire book on Real-Time Rendering — see http://www.realtimerendering.com/.
Several other view-dependent refinement methods have been published. Here are a couple other examples that were published contemporaneously with Hoppe’s paper above.
J. C. Xia and A. Varshney. Dynamic view-dependent simplification for polygonal models. In Proceedings of Visualization ‘96. [PDF]
D. Luebke and C. Erikson. View-dependent simplification of arbitrary polygonal environments. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 97, pp. 199–208. [PDF] [other]
More recently, the emphasis in this kind of work has been on massive models. Here’s one recent example.