HILITE

The main focus of the HILITE project lies on the development of an advanced lighting simulation system, which allows real-time interactions in terms of movement and scene modification in order to provide a fast, dynamic and easy-to-use way to visualize new lighting concepts in architectural scenarios. The framework will make it possible to give users (and potential customers) a highly realistic and interactively modifiable preview of the illumination to expect inside and/or outside a building.

Changes in the scene (light sources, geometry, daytime …) lead to an immediate need for a recalculation of the illumination result. By using an iteratively improving approach on modern GPU hardware, which converges to the physically correct solution after several hundred frames, scene interactions are still made possible during these costly computations – even in cases of a large number of physically complex light sources.

The developed system will make it possible to visualize the simulation results on both regular monitors as well as on 3D stereo setups with multiple screens, providing an immersive impression of the illuminated buildings. By applying an interactive graphical user interface, it will be both possible to modify light source settings (like position, type, color and intensity) and scene geometry attributes (like textures or object positions/orientation), offering on-the-fly changes in scene and light simulation configuration.

Recent result screenshots (April/May 2011):

First color bleeding effects in the current version of the HILITE application

The Museum Scene rendered using the current state of the HILITE application in ~10 seconds.

Illuminated Easter Bunny sitting in a virtual model of the "Hofburg Festsaal"