As was mentioned in lecture, speeding up geometric queries can be crucial for not only graphics applications but also for simulation purposes. For example, in molecular dynamics simulations, atom-atom interactions must be identified and processed at every simulation step. These atom-atom interactions are characterized by the distance and angle between different atoms, and are often efficiently processed by dividing up the 3D space into a uniform grid and only searching for atom-atom interactions between neighboring volumes. In these cases, the cutoff radius of the interaction is used to define the size of the uniform grid, which means that only the nearest volumes need to be processed to identify all atom-atom interactions at any step.
As was mentioned in lecture, speeding up geometric queries can be crucial for not only graphics applications but also for simulation purposes. For example, in molecular dynamics simulations, atom-atom interactions must be identified and processed at every simulation step. These atom-atom interactions are characterized by the distance and angle between different atoms, and are often efficiently processed by dividing up the 3D space into a uniform grid and only searching for atom-atom interactions between neighboring volumes. In these cases, the cutoff radius of the interaction is used to define the size of the uniform grid, which means that only the nearest volumes need to be processed to identify all atom-atom interactions at any step.