Fool me twice: Exploring and exploiting error tolerance in physics-based animation

The error tolerance of human perception offers a range of opportunities to trade numerical accuracy for performance in physics-based simulation. However, most prior work on perceptual error tolerance either focus exclusively on understanding the tolerance of the human visual system or burden the application developer with case-specific implementations such as Level-of-Detail (LOD) techniques. In this article, based on a detailed set of perceptual metrics, we propose a methodology to identify the maximum error tolerance of physics simulation. Then, we apply this methodology in the evaluation of four case studies. First, we utilize the methodology in the tuning of the simulation timestep. The second study deals with tuning the iteration count for the LCP solver. Then, we evaluate the perceptual quality of Fast Estimation with Error Control (FEEC) [Yeh et al. 2006]. Finally, we explore the hardware optimization technique of precision reduction.