Light Field Techniques for Reflections and Refractions

Abstract

Reflections and refractions are important visual effects that have longbeen considered too costly for interactive applications. Although mostcontemporary graphics hardware supports reflections off curved surfacesin the form of environment maps, refractions in thick, solid objectscannot be handled with this approach, and the simplifying assumptions ofenvironment maps also produce visible artifacts for reflections.Only recently have researchers developed techniques for the interactiverendering of true reflections and refractions in curved objects. Thispaper introduces a new, light field based approach to achieving thisgoal. The method is based on a strict decoupling of geometry andillumination. Hardware support for all stages of the technique ispossible through existing extensions of the OpenGL rendering pipeline.In addition, we also discuss storage issues and introduce methods forhandling vector-quantized data with graphics hardware.