[LE COSE DETTE IN QUESTA INTRO SONO STATE GIA' DETTE IN PRECEDENZA. PER ORA LASCIO COSI' MA BISOGNEREBBE EVITARE LE RIDONDANZE]
A naive use of MTs from any application handling terrain data consists simply of extracting a TIN at a user-defined accuracy, and using it as a data set for subsequent processing (e.g., visualization, analysis, or simulation). In this case, a single TIN extraction is needed, which is performed by using a selected focus condition and LOD threshold. This simple feature is an improvement over the use of a terrain model at uniform resolution, since it allows an application to run on a model whose level of detail is suitable to match its needs, and/or the computing power.
However, the true power of VARIANT is exploited by applications that make direct use of variable resolution features to improve performance. In the following, we list some examples of MT-clients that are meant to exploit such features.