Light Field Techniques for Reflections and Refractions

Reflections and refractions are important visual effects that have long been considered too costly for interactive applications. Although most contemporary graphics hardware supports reflections off curved surfaces in the form of environment maps, refractions in thick, solid objects cannot be handled with this approach, and even for reflections the simplifying assumptions of environment maps sometimes produce visible artifacts. Only recently have researchers developed techniques for the interactive rendering of true reflections and refractions in curved objects. This paper introduces a new, light field based approach to achieving this goal. The method is based on a strict decoupling of geometry and illumination, and hardware support for all stages of the technique is possible through existing extensions of the OpenGL rendering pipeline. In addition we also discuss storage issues and introduce methods for handling vector-quantized data with graphics hardware