Practical Precomputed Radiance Transfer for Mixed Reality

Mixed Reality and its concept of virtual superimposed on real space interplay invoke such interactive experiences that promote new patterns of believability and presence for cultural heritage applications. The seamless integration of virtual cultural artifacts with ‘real lights’ or images of real scenes, is an important step towards believability and consistency in synthesized MR scenes. That synthesized world termed Augmented Reality allows seeing the real scene with virtual augmentations superimposed onto it, but often fails to produce a realtime image that as a whole is a believable integrated experience. Furthermore, often Virtual Reality cultural heritage reconstructions are not physically correct rendered in real-time. Our main research efforts are twofold: adding believable and realistically simulated real-time virtual artifacts superimposed on real video sequence images, as well as employ dynamic ‘area lights’ for real-time large scale VR site reconstructions. The main novelty of this combined effort is a new adaptation of a physically correct illumination model for virtual cultural heritage artifacts as well as large scale reconstructions based on ‘real area light‘, captured via light probes and employed in an extended graphics hardware accelerated Precomputed Radiance Transfer algorithm.