Bounding Volume Hierarchies
Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH) is a spatial data structure used in computer graphics and computational geometry to accelerate collision detection, ray tracing, and visibility queries. It organizes objects in a scene by recursively partitioning them into nested bounding volumes (such as boxes or spheres), creating a tree-like hierarchy. This structure enables efficient culling of irrelevant objects, significantly reducing the number of pairwise comparisons needed for operations like intersection testing.
Developers should learn BVH when working on performance-critical applications involving 3D graphics, physics simulations, or spatial queries, such as video games, CAD software, or scientific visualizations. It is essential for optimizing real-time rendering in ray tracing engines (e.g., for global illumination) and collision detection in physics engines, where brute-force methods are too slow for complex scenes. BVH helps achieve interactive frame rates by minimizing computational overhead through hierarchical spatial subdivision.