Real-Time Rendering of Real World Environments

: One of the most important goals of interactive computer graphics is to allow a user to freely walk around a virtual recreation of a real environment that looks as real as the world around us. But hand-modeling such a virtual environment is inherently limited and acquiring the scene model using devices also presents challenges. Interactively rendering such a detailed model is beyond the limits of current graphics hardware, but image-based approaches can significantly improve the status quo. We present an end-to-end system for acquiring highly detailed scans of large real world spaces, consisting of forty to eighty million range and color samples, using a digital camera and laser rangefinder. We explain successful techniques to represent these large data sets as image-based models and present contributions to image-based rendering that allow these models to be rendered in real time on existing graphics hardware without sacrificing the high resolution at which the data sets were acquire...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: RT
• Authors: David K. McAllister, Lars S. Nyland, Voicu Popescu, Anselmo Lastra, Chris McCue
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Data Sets, Graphics Hardware, Image-based Approaches, RT 1999