Real-time reflection on moving vehicles in urban environments

In the context of virtual reality, the simulation of complex environments with many animated objects is becoming more and more common. Virtual reality applications have always promoted the development of new efficient algorithms and image-based rendering techniques for real-time interaction. In this paper, we propose a technique which allows the real-time simulation in a city of the reflections of static geometry (eg. building) on specular dynamic objects (vehicles). For this, we introduce the idea of multiple environment maps. We pre-compute a set of reference environment maps at strategic positions in the scene, that are used at run time and for each visible dynamic object, to compute local environment maps by resampling images. To efficiently manage a small number of reference environment maps, compared to the scene dimension, for each vertex of the reconstructed environment we perform a ray tracing in a heightfield representation of the scene. We control the frame rate by adaptative reconstruction of environment maps. We have implemented this approach, and the results show that it is efficient and scalable to many dynamic objects while maintaining interactive frame rates.