Online Radiosity in Interactive Virtual Reality Applications

In todays virtual reality (VR) applications, realistic shadows are often added in a preprocess to VR scenes in order to increase visual realism. Since pre-calulated illuminations, cannot be recomputed fast enough for interactive applications, realistic lighting is currently incorporated only into non-interactive, static VR applications. In this paper, a new method for integrating soft radiosity shadows within interactive VR applications is presented. The technical approach is to run the radiosity process in parallel to the rendering process of the VR system. Both processes communicate via shared memory. User interactions trigger the radiosity process, which updates the illumination by calculating new vertex colors locally only in the areas directly affected by the interaction, and then sending them to the VR system. Using this scheme, it becomes feasible to incorporate radiosity shadows not only in static environments but also in interactive, dynamic scenarios, where scenariodiffaction s can be made interactively by the user, or where autonomous objects move by themselves.