Bounding interval hierarchies can be used in high performance (or real-time) ray tracing and may be especially useful for dynamic scenes.
Although a more general non-axis-aligned implementation of the BIH should be possible (similar to the BSP-tree, which uses unaligned planes), it would almost certainly be less desirable due to decreased numerical stability and an increase in the complexity of ray traversal.
The key feature of the BIH is the storage of 2 planes per node (as opposed to 1 for the kd tree and 6 for an axis aligned bounding box hierarchy), which allows for overlapping children (just like a BVH), but at the same time featuring an order on the children along one dimension/axis (as it is the case for kd trees).
It is also possible to just use the BIH data structure for the construction phase but traverse the tree in a way a traditional axis aligned bounding box hierarchy does.
Some general attributes of bounding interval hierarchies (and techniques related to BIH) as described by[4] are: To construct any space partitioning structure some form of heuristic is commonly used.