This talk will consist of two parts:
This first part describes a series of algorithms that allow the unconstrained walkthrough of static scenes shaded with the results of precomputed global illumination. The global illumination includes specular as well as diffuse terms, and intermediate results are cached as surface light fields. The compression of such light fields is examined, and a lazy decompression scheme is presented which allows for high-quality compression by making use of block-coding techniques. This scheme takes advantage of spatial coherence within the light field to aid compression, and also makes use of temporal coherence to accelerate decompression. Finally the techniques are extended to a certain type of dynamic scene.
This is joint work with Dr. Steven Rubin of Interval Research and Dr. Dulce Ponceleon of IBM Almaden.
This second part describes efficient algorithms for rendering sprites with the appearance of ray-traced objects. These sprites refract what is behind them and reflect the user as seen by a video camera. Applications include interactive multimedia and previewing glossy and metallic ink effects.
This is joint work with Marc Mondesir of Stanford.
These results have appeared in the Proceedings of the 1998 Eurographics Rendering Workshop.
Gavin Miller received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1986. He then held the position of "Project Leader Natural Phenomena" at Alias Research Inc., in Toronto, Canada, before joining the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, Inc. in 1988. He now works at Interval Research Corporation. His research interests include natural phenomena, physically-based animation and real-time synthetic and image-based rendering.