Realistic realtime illumination of complex environment for immersive systems a case study: the Parthenon

Off-line rendering techniques have nowadays reached an astonishing level of realism but pay the cost of long computational times. The new generation of programmable graphic hardware, on the other hand, gives the possibility to implement in realtime some of the visual effects previously available only for cinematographic production. We describe the design of an interactive system which is able to reproduce in realtime one of the crucial sequences from the short movie 'The Parthenon' presented at Siggraph 2004. The application is designed to run on a specific immersive reality system, making possible for a user to perceive the virtual environment with a nearly cinematographic visual quality. In this paper we present the principal ideas of the project, discussing the design issues and the technical solutions used to implement the realtime demo.