LightSkin: Real-Time Global Illumination for Virtual and Mixed Reality

Abstract

Synthesizing global illumination effects is a vast field of research for both offline and real-time rendering. While the most important goals for offline rendering are realism and physical correctness, real-time rendering approaches additionally need to be sufficiently fast. In this paper we present a fast and novel global illumination approach ca-pable to realize indirect illumination for diffuse and glossy surfaces based on thousands of virtual area lights even for dynamic scenes. To achieve real-time performance we calculate indirect light influence only on sparse scene points in model-space and interpolate the results for the entire visible scene. A novel shading technique is proposed to support high-frequency indirect lighting effects such as view-dependent glossy reflections without introducing temporal incoherence in dynamic scenes. Since our approach does not require any pre-computation it may be ap-plied to Mixed Reality applications improving the visual integration of virtual content.