"Toward Interactive and User-Friendly Digital Lighting"
fabio pellacini
Visiting assistant professor, cornell
Friday, March 18
1131 Kemper Hall
11:00 AM
The use of synthetic images has become an integral part of engineering, design, art, entertainment, visualization, and other disciplines. While advances in software algorithms and hardware architectures have made synthetic images more readily available, two major limiting factors remain: the computational cost of the synthesis process and the human labor and the technical expertise required to create the necessary environments, that have to contain a description of the geometry, materials and lights of the synthetic scene. Of these three aspects, geometric models are the most readily available, while materials and in particular accurate lighting remain hard to simulate. The first reason for this difficulty is that realistic lighting is the most computationally intensive aspect of 3d image synthesis, often requiring minutes or hours for a single high-quality image. Furthermore, editing lighting configurations is a very human intensive task, whose cost is exacerbated by cumbersome and unintuitive user interfaces that limit creativity and artistic expression for all but technically-trained users. During this talk I will present some of my work in the areas of interactive lighting algorithms and user interfaces that starts to address some of these issues.