Interactive Walkthroughs and Higher Order Global Illumination

The subtle lighting effects, which can be simulated by global illumination, are important to make virtual worlds look realistic. Higher order global illumination methods, like Wavelet Radiosity, have proven to be very efficient, but do not directly lead to solutions that can be used by the hardware used to display walkthroughs. In this paper, we discuss methods to efficiently map these higher order radiosity solutions to representations suitable for hardware acceleration. Additionally, we discuss similar methods to deal with directionally-depended solutions generated for example by Wavelet Radiance algorithms. CR Descriptors: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-dimensional Graphics and Realism — radiosity; virtual reality;