In interactive physical simulation, contact forces are applied
to prevent rigid bodies from penetrating and control
slipping between bodies. Accurate contact force
determination is a computationally hard problem. Thus,
in practice one trades accuracy for performance. The
result is visual artifacts such as viscous or damped contact
response. In this paper, we present heuristics for
improving performance for solving contact force problems
in interactive rigid body simulation. We formulate
the contact force problem as a nonlinear complementarity
problem, and discretize the problem using a splitting
method and a minimum map reformulation. The resulting
model is called the Projected Gauss–Seidel method.
Quantitative research results are presented and can be
used as a taxonomy for selecting a suitable heuristic
when using the Projected Gauss–Seidel method.