Question about Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes

Hi all,

I´m very new to ODE and just looking at the demos of it. I´m using Ogre and am looking for a Physic Engine I can manage to use. I first started with Newton but had quite a few problems, so I decided to try ODE.

While looking at the ODE Demos I used the possibility to show the AABB of the bodies there and saw, that even a sphere has a box as AABB. No while writing this I see, that I probaply mixe something up and I hope someone can tell me the difference of a collision Body(like in Newton) and an AABB.

I guess the Collision Body is for detecting Collisions, but what is the AABB good for if not for the Collision detection

thank you for your help

greetings
Christian

aabbs are used to check if an object is visible. in this case its not necessary that the computation is exact but instead its lethal that the computation is fast