Interestingly, technology transfer
and the rate of advancement moves
so quickly in the computer graphics
field that already much of the earlier
global illumination work by the authors discussed
above was applied in the paper “Reflection Space
Image-Based Rendering”5 to the problem of rendering
high-quality, physically accurate scenes at interactive
rates. With this work, the bidirectional
reflectance distribution function (BRDF) for a lighting
environment can be precomputed on a simple
cube or sphere. The result drives an environmentmapped
lighting model, which is fast, but closely
approximates the feel of the physical environment.