Here, you can see some animated view-dependent refinement examples. Green lines describes the viewing frustum according to a phantom camera, to demonstrate the view dependent refinement process. If the user does not spawn a phantom camera, the refinement process is done with respect to the normal camera whose image plane is the whole window.
Uğur Güdükbay, Okan Arıkan, Bülent Özgüç, "Visualizer: A Mesh Visualization System using View-dependent Refinement", Computers & Graphics, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 491-503, 2002.